[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2013-07-24

[Walter Bender]

"Dr. Ambedkar believed that ... to escape from oppression, they had to
... ‘educate, agitate and organize’ their way to emancipation."
--Ramachandra Guha

== Sugar Digest ==

1. Just for fun, taking inspiration from a conversation with Manuel
Quiñones, I added a new sample program to Turtle Art. The
sensor-record.tb project [1] lets the user draw a picture with the
mouse (or touch) and generates on the fly a Turtle Art project that
will reproduce the drawing. Silly, but fun nonetheless. It comes
bundled with the Version 185 of Turtle Blocks. (I still have the goal
to recreate all of Sugar in Turtle Art.)

2. I also finally got around to writing a variant of Turtle Confusion
[2] based on flags. Turtle Flags [3] uses a database of national flags
from the Wikipedia [4] to present programming challenges. The first
flag is Peru, which is red and white stripes. But things get more
challenging from there.

3. Spirituality for Kids [5] is a website that attempts to help
children "understand the benefits of human dignity, tolerance,
connecting to self, community, and the world, they are better equipped
to become conscious leaders in their homes, schools and communities."
I've worked with them to convert some of their material into a series
of Sugar activities [6-11]. Two caveats: (1) the activities contain
some rather large OGV videos, so be prepared for long download times
and make sure you have plenty of available disk space. (I had broken
the original activity up into 6 parts to address this, but may have to
break it up even further.); and (2) the content is English only at the
moment. I am working with them on packaging their Spanish-language
videos.

4. Aura Mora announced three new Sugar activities from the ANSPE
project in Colombia (National Agency for Overcoming Extreme Poverty):

* Super Chef [12]: This game raises the challenge to service many
patrons in the shortest possible time. The Chef should suggest and
prepare delicious and nutritious recipes at different times of day:
breakfast, snacks, lunch and dinner. So, while the child attends to
customers, proper practice habits and learn food preparation varied
and nutritious recipes for each meal.

* Cuidarme [13]: This is a skill game where the player must resolve a
conflict destroy a ghost.

* Participation [14]: The challenge of this game is to match sporting,
cultural and recreational activities and institutions that are offered
in your area.

5. Ignacio Rodriguez (with some help from his friends) created a new
activity [15] to let Sugar users change the XO avatar in the user
interface. In the spirit of encouraging our users to make Sugar into
an expression of their own learning.

=== In the community ===

4. It is official: International Turtle Art Day will be on October 12.
Pacita Peña and Cecilia Alcala will be hosting an event in Caacupé and
there will be other events around the world sharing ideas and
resources. More details soon.

=== Tech Talk ===

5. I've been working in enhancing the intra-Sugar statistics gathering
mechanism in order to "make learning visible" to the child and
classroom teacher. We landed a patch to Sugar a while ago to record
activiy launch times (previously, just the most recent launch time was
recorded). With these new data, it is possible to not just make
visible which activities have been used, but also, how often each
instance of an activity has been used. I've modified the Analyze
Journal activity [16] to reflect these changes and Gonzalo Odiard and
I are working on a classroom management system [17] to facilitate
sharing of these data between the learner and the classroom teacher.
This is very early in the effort: comments and feedback most welcome.

6. Daniel Drake got married this week in Nicaragua! Congratulations
and best wishes for a joyful union. The festivities did not deter
Daniel from announcing the release of OLPC OS 13.2.0 for XO-1, XO-1.5,
XO-1.75 and XO-4. Details of new features, known issues, and how to
download/install/upgrade can all be found in the release notes [18].
Many thanks Daniel, who lead the release process and to all
contributors, testers, upstreams, and those who have provided feedback
of any kind. This is by far the best OLPC/Sugar release yet! (Also,
there is a really nice article about what else Daniel has been doing
in Nicaragua here [19].)

=== Sugar Labs ===

7. Please visit (and contribute to) our planet [20].


-walter

----

[1] https://git.sugarlabs.org/turtleart/mainline/blobs/raw/master/samples/sensors-record.tb
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Confusion
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleFlags
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_sovereign-state_flags
[5] http://www.spiritualityforkids.com/
[6] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4679
[7] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4680
[8] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4681
[9] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4684
[10] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4686
[11] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4685
[12] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/es-ES/sugar/addon/4672
[13] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/es-ES/sugar/addon/4676
[14] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/es-ES/sugar/addon/4677
[15] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4683
[16] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Analyze_Journal
[17] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Classroom_management
[18] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.0
[19] http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2013/07/24/reportajes-especiales/155871-isla-maestros?movil
[20] http://planet.sugarlab.org

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