[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2012-04-12

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. Over last weekend, OLPC hosted a documentation sprint at their
Cambridge office. It was great to meet a number of new-to-me faces,
including Craig Perue and Mark Battley, with whom I enjoyed a great
conversation about how we can make Sugar (and Sugar documentation)
more useful. As a result, we are trending more towards documenting not
just what and how, but also why and how. Many thanks to Adam Holt for
organizing the event and also to everyone who participated -- those
who came from long distances, such as Nancie Severs, Bill Stelzer,
Sameer Verma, Christoph Derndorfer, Laura de Reynal, and Ed Cherlin,
as well as those who participated remotely, such as Caryl Bigenho. The
results can be seen in refreshed wiki pages and a new Help activity.

2. Claudia Urrea and I spend the first half of the week in Managua
with Felix Garrido and the deployment team at Fundación Zamora Terán.
The overall purpose of the visit was to discuss strategies for
evaluation in light of the foundation's recent expansion of its laptop
program to the Island of Ometepe. I spent some time acquainting the
learning team with the latest feature of the Portfolio tool and some
enhancements to Sugar that will "make learning visible" not just to
administrators, but also to the learners themselves. While we were
there, also I had a chance to catch up with Daniel Drake and consume
some taco soup.

During the conversation with the learning team, the topic of nutrition
came up. FZT is working with USAID on a nutrition curriculum. We
discussed ways to integrate the curriculum into Sugar, by or example,
using the Turtle Art [1]. I was inspired by our discussion of the Food
Pyramid, so on the flight back to Boston, I wrote a new activity, [2].
What is potentially fun about it is that not only can you explore the
precompiled database of foods, but you can also load your own foods
into the database. So, for example, a child could take a photo (using
Record) or draw a picture (using Paint) of dinner, and then load that
food into the activity.

3. The Scratch team has updated their license documentation such that
it is once again compatible with Sugar's Free Software guidelines.
Please see [3].

4. There continues to be growing interest in localizing Sugar to
indigenous languages. The latest project is with the Nahuatl language.
The work is being done in cooperation with the State Government in San
Luis Potosí through the Secretary of Education, the Universidad
Politécnica de San Luis Potosí (UPSLP), the Instituto de Lenguas
Indígenas. There is also interest in starting a program in the Xi'úi
languaje (Pame).

=== In the community ===

5. Details for eduJAM! [4] the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo are
available. eduJAM will be followed by a code sprint [5] on the 13th
and 14th.

6. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo
(May 17-19) and May 21-22 in Buenos Aires.

=== Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list:

2012 Mar 31st-Apr 6th (14 emails) [6]
2012 Mar 24th-30th (6 emails) [7]
2012 March 17th-23rd (17 emails) [8]
Visit our planet [9] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

----

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Nutrition|Food Plugin
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Nutrition
[3] http://info.scratch.mit.edu/GPLv2_Licensed_Scratch_Code
[4] http://ceibaljam.org/?q=edujam2012
[5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/EduJAM/CodeSprint
[6] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2012-Mar-31-Apr-6-som.jpg
[7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2012-Mar-24-30.jpg
[8] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2012-March-17-23-som.jpg
[9] http://plant.sugarlabs.org


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