[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2014-02-09

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

The task from K-12 is building a thirst for knowledge, pleasure in
speaking up, and curiosity, curiosity, curiosity--persistently pursued.
We need habits of the mind that carry over to the many hours we are
not in school and the years and years that follow.  -- Deborah Meier

----

It has been awhile. Google Code In pretty much consumed me from
mid-November to mid-January. From there I was spirited away to Sydney,
where I am working with Paul Cotton on a new Sugar activity that the
OLPC AU deployment plans to use for introducing Sugar to classroom
teachers. And more recently, I just finished up the Sugar Labs
application to Google Summer of Code 2014.

1. Regarding GCI, I am please to announce that Ignacio Rodríguez and
Jorge Gómez were our two grand-prize winners. They will travel to
Google in early April. Gonzalo Odiard will join them as the Sugar Labs
representative. Our other finalists were Sai Vineet, Emil Dudev, and
Sam Parkinson. An amazing group of young developers. Between them they
made contributions to Sugar core, numerous Sugar activities, and
enhanced our documentation. Ignacio wrote two new web services --
PutLocker [1] and GDrive [2] -- and four new Sugar activities during
the contest. Jorge made numerous enhancements to Turtle Art and has
written a first pass of Turtle Art in Javascript. Sai Vineet added pen
and rope objects to the Physics activity, developed unit tests for
Sugar activities, and made numerous enhancements to Pippy. Emil Dudev
converted Sugar core to use gsettings and added a microphone volume
control widget to the Frame. Sam wrote an icon viewer to the Sugar
Journal, made an amazing how-to video for view source, and enabled
recording to external devices in the Record activity. All five have
been very active since the end of the contest, continuing to make
significant contributions. For example, Sam just revamped the Sugar
notification service. I cannot sufficiently express the degree to
which their contributions enhance our project: not just the code,
which is of high quality, but the fact that Sugar, to a greater and
greater extent, is being shaped by its end-user community. Kids from
Australia to Zimbabwe taking responsibility for their tools of
learning and expression. Wow. It works!

Ignacio and Gonzalo have assembled a page in the wiki to summarize the
various contributions by the GCI participants [3].

2. I am please to announce that José Miguel García has joined the
Sugar Labs oversight board (AKA SLOB). José Miguel brings his years of
experience in pedagogical research and practice to our discussions and
he brings additional perspective from the South, where we have so many
Sugar learners. SLOB members have been meeting regularly on the first
Monday of each month at 9AM EST (14 UTC). Meeting notes can be found
in the wiki [4].

3. I submitted an application on behalf of Sugar Labs to GSoC 2014
[5]. I've also begun assembling a page of project ideas. Please feel
free to contribute additional idea. We are soliciting additional
mentors, but please note that we are vetting our mentors quite
rigorously this year to ensure that their commitment to the students
is adequate to ensure a successful outcome. Please feel free to
contact me if you have any questions.

4. Manuel Quiñones and Gonzalo are organizing a design contest for
Sugar background images.[6]. More details to be announced soon.

=== In the community ===

5. 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 [7]

=== Tech Talk ===

6. Lionel Laské has been great strides on "Sugarizer" [8], a version
of Sugar that runs in a web browser.

7. Lots of cool new features in the Physics activity [9] (including
collaboration) and Pippy [10].

8. Feedback regarding the beta version of the aforementioned "teacher
training" activity [11] would be greatly appreciated.

9. I am on a mission to make as much of Sugar as possible available to
"user space". Part of that effort was realized by making Sugar
extensions available from ~/.sugar/default/extensions. More recently,
I have been working on a new web service (with help from Martin
Abente) that exposes many basic Sugar services to user space [12],
e.g. sugar shell and journal. Again, feedback most welcome.

=== Sugar Labs ===

10. Please visit our planet [13].

-walter

[1] https://github.com/ignaciouy/upload-web service
[2] https://github.com/ignaciouy/sugar-gdrive
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2013/Final_Work
[4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Minutes#Meetings
[5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2014
[6] https://gist.github.com/manuq/fbc0126fbacd4c3e313e
[7] http://fr.amiando.com/sugarcamp3.html
[8] http://sugarizer.org/
[9] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4193
[10] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4041
[11] https://github.com/walterbender/training
[12] https://github.com/walterbender/sugarservices
[13] http://planet.sugarlabs.org

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