[Sugar-news] Sugar DIgest 2011-03-15

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. The Chipote/Sugarlabs cycling team won a stage [1] in the Rutas
Américas race in Uruguay this past week. By the big race, the Tour of
Uruguay (Vuelta a Uruguay) is not until next month. We have been
accumulating some great ideas for learning activities for the children
of Uruguay to engage in leading up to and during the race (See [2]).
We are lacking someone to coordinate these efforts in Uruguay: package
up the ideas; get the word out to the teachers and children, etc.
Please let me know if you are interested in helping.

2. Speaking of Uruguay, it seems that there is consensus to hold a
Sugar Camp in Montevideo in conjunction with Ceibal Jam's EduJam [3]
in May 5–7. The plan is to add two days (Sunday/Monday, May 8, 9) of
coding just after the main conference. Details to follow. In the week
prior to the Camp, there will be a "Conozco Uruguay" Community
Exploration Tour [4] for those interested in seeing Sugar in action in
the schools of Uruguay.

We do need to discuss some of the details of the Camp. Please add you
ideas to the wiki page [5].

3. There will also be a Squeakfest [6] in Montevideo at the end of May
(26–28 at Universidad Católica del Uruguay).

4. Christian Marc Schmidt and Gary Martin have been holding weekly
design meetings. Along with Sascha Silbe and others, we have been
making a lot of progress on a number of backlogged issues. You can
read the logs here: [7].

5. Rather than writing my column for the Sugar Digest, once again I
have gotten sucked down a coding rat hole :). My two terrible
addictions seem to be coffee and Python. Since I last posted, I have
been doing more work on the Turtle Art plugin mechanism. I have two
community efforts under way to use plugins: Ian Daniher wrote a plugin
for WeDo and Emiliano Pastorino has written a plugin for NXT. (An
Arduino plugin is also in the works.) I got lots of great feedback
from both of them (as well as Raul and Tony) and made some adjustments
that will be part of Release 107.

Also, as part of Release 107 is better handling of shared turtles when
using Turtle Art collaboratively. With the help of Simon, Gonzalo, and
Tony, I managed to sort out a number of little problems that added up
to a lot of confusion: for example, you can no longer drag a turtle
that someone else is sharing with you. This fixes a problem with
synchronization of shared turtles (#2687]). Also, the problem with
extra turtles appearing when you open a project under a new 'nickname'
has been fixed (#2441]).

6. I also wrote a new game: Paths [8]. It is based upon a game I
played with Oscar Becerra in Lima a few weeks ago. The basic idea is
to create closed paths using tiles on an 8×8 grid. A collaborative
version will be available soon. Meanwhile, download [9] it and play
against the robot.

7. I have also been working on a 'learn to read' activity with a
Canadian educational foundation. Details available soon.

===Help wanted===

8. As mentioned above, we need help on the ground in Uruguay for
Vuelta a Uruguay.

===Tech Talk===

9. Tom Gilliard (satellit) has done some experimenting with Sugar
running with GNOME 3 (See [10] for details).

===Sugar Labs===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list.

2011 Mar 5th-11th (21 emails)
2011 Feb 26th-Mar 4th (55 emails)
2011 Feb 19th-25th (63 emails)

Visit our planet [12] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

-walter


[1] http://www.velonation.com/News/ID/7743/Rathe-grabs-Rutas-de-America-stage-win-for-Chipotle-Development-Team.aspx
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Vuelta_a_Uruguay
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Uruguay_Summit_2011
[4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Conozco_Uruguay_Tour
[5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Camp_Q2_2011
[6] http://squeakland.org/
[7] http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-02-13
     http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-02-20
     http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-02-27
     http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-03-06 and
     http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-03-13
[8] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Paths
[9] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4409
[10] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Fedora#Fedora_15_gnome3_with_sugar_0.92.0
[11] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Mar-5-11-som.jpg
      http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Feb-26-Mar-4-som.jpg
      http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Feb-19-25-som.jpg
[12] http://planet.sugarlabs.org

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org