[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2012-01-25

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. I was in Colombia last week and had a chance to meet up with some
Sugar hackers in Bogota. It was nice to catch up with Rafael Ortiz and
Pilar Saenz and to meet Fabian Prieto. The interest in Sugar in
Colombia is on the rise, so it is great that there is a local
community that can offer support.

In Cali, I met with Eduteka [1], a comprehensive education portal used
throughout the region. I gave them a mini-Turtle Art workshop with the
goal that they would be able to write a plugin for a simple USB IO
device that they have built.

2. Speaking of USB IO devices, Tony Forster is having fun [2] with the
Freetronics Leostick [3], an Arduino "on a stick", which were given
out to every attendee of LCA 2012. It looks really cute. I haven't
been able to find a price for it anywhere on the Freetronics website,
but it looks quite promising. Tony also pulled together a WeDo plugin
[4, 5] for Turtle Art into shape (based on the work of Ian Daniher
[6]).

3. Speaking of Turtle Art plugins, I have begun working on a new
plugin to explore nutrition. The idea is to have a variety of food
"blocks", each representing a polynomial description of their
nutritional value. Numerical value blocks will accumulate factors such
as calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, calcium, iron, fiber, salt,
vitamin A, vitamin C, saturated fats, cholesterol, et al. The blocks
can then be used to calculate the various nutritional value of a
recipe or diet. Eventually, I'd like to add various operations such as
the impact of cooking. Stay tuned.

4. Along with Pacita Pena and Martin Oesterreich, the first release
version of the I Can Read activity [7] is just about ready. Keep an
eye out on activities.sugarlabs.org.
--
5. Quote of the week: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of
experts." --Richard Feynman

=== In the community ===

6. There will be an eduJAM! in the  week of May 7-12 in Montevideo.
Details to follow.

=== Tech Talk ===

7. The Devel Team has been making great progress on the new features
for Sugar 0.96 [8].

8. AlanJAS (Alan Jhonn Aguiar Schwyn) has embarked upon an ASLO
cleanup. See [9] for the details on all of his analysis work. There
are many small tasks that need attention. Please jump in to help if
you have time.

9. Sugar is a learning community: I love reading Sascha Silbe's patch
reviews. I learn something every time.

=== Sugar Labs ===

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

2012 Jan 7th-13th (45 emails) [10]

Visit our planet [11] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

-walter

----

[1] http://eduteka.org
[2] http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2012/01/arduino-and-xo-laptop.html
[3] http://www.freetronics.com/pages/leostick-quickstart-guide
[4] http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2012/01/wedo-plugin-for-turtle-art.html
[5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Wedo_plugin.tar.gz
[6] https://github.com/itdaniher/WeDoMore/tree/master/TurtleArt
[7] http://git.sugarlabs.org/icanread
[8] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Feature_List
[9] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AntaXnq4oy2_dHpvZHhLeGRQYzc1cDlRZU9Mc1NldGc
[10] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2012-January-7-13-som.jpg
[11] http://plant.sugarlabs.org


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