[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2014-04-01

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. Daniel Narvaez just released Sugar 0.101.6 (unstable). See [1] for
detailed notes on changes since Sugar 0.100. The tarfiles are
available at [2-4] and new test builds are being prepared (keep an eye
on [5]). We've entered Feature Freeze (which had been extended by
three weeks to enable us to land a few more features). Time to chase
down bugs. Tip-of-the-hat to Gonzalo Odiard, Martin Abente, and Manuel
Quiñones, who put so much effort into getting the last few features
over the hump. Also, an extraordinary number of new features were
contributed by our Google Code-in students: special kudos to Emil
Dudev, Ignacio Rodriguez, and Sam Parkinson. Finally, it was really
nice to see so many first-time contributors.

2. Gonzalo has made some videos demonstrating the new features in both
Sugar 100 [6] and Sugar 102 [7].

3. We are reviewing Google Summer of Code applications. We had 35
applicants this year. We'll know in a few weeks how many slots we get
from Google.

4. I traveled to Colombia a few weeks ago with Claudia Urrea to visit
a wonderful ANSPE project in Chia being run by Aura Mora [8]. Saw some
old friends (Sebastian Silva, Laura Vargas, and Sandra Barragán) and
made many new friends. The highlights for me were the two Turtle Art
workshops: one at the National University in Bogota and the other with
the children in Chia.

5. Claudia and Erik Blankinship joined me on a panel discussuion at
LibrePlanet 2014 [9]. The panel, which will be available online, was
"No more mouse: saving elementary education".

:The lack of a mouse and the presence of "the mouse" are having a
detrimental impact on global elementary education. The rush to adopt
tablets is putting passive tools of consumption into the hands of
young learners at a time in their development when "making" is
paramount. The "Disneyification" of media further erodes the
opportunity for personal expression by young learners. In this panel
we will characterize these threats and discuss strategies for
combating them.

=== In the community ===

6. Sugar Camp #3 - Paris, hosted by Bastien Guerry, will be held from
12-13 April in Carrefour Numérique - Cité des Sciences. For more
information, see [10].

7. Claudia will be hosting a Learning Chat on Wednesday, 2 April, at
10AM EST, 15 GMT. The guest speaker will be Gonzalo. Please join us at
irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting. (These meetings will be held
regularly on the first Wednesday of each month.)

8. The Sugar Background Image Contest has begun. See [11] for details.

=== Tech Talk ===

9. I wrote a new activity while I was in Colombia: Word Cloud [12] is
a simple activity for generating word clouds from text.

10. Another new activity worth mentioning is Flappy [13] by Alan
Aguiar. Enjoy. (I cannot get past the first gate.)

=== Sugar Labs ===

9. Please visit our planet [14].

----

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.102/Notes
[2] http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar/sugar-0.101.6.tar.xz
[3] http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-artwork/sugar-artwork-0.101.4.tar.xz
[4] http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/sugar-toolkit-gtk3-0.101.4.tar.xz
[5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.102/Testing
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot_T9impkNw
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10ljkueuBU0
[8] http://www.anspe.gov.co/es/sala-de-prensa/noticia/convenio-entre-la-anspe-one-laptop-child-olpc-y-la-alcaldia-de-chia
[9] http://libreplanet.org/2014/
[10] http://fr.amiando.com/sugarcamp3.html
[11] http://contest.sugarlabs.org
[12] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4734
[13] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4731
[14] http://planet.sugarlabs.org

-walter

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