[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2014-10-01

[Walter Bender]

errata:

7. The next Turtle Art Day event will be a workshop at Prospect Hill
Academy in Somerville. Caroline Meeks is hosting the event.

-walter

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> ==Sugar Digest==
>
> 1. September was an exciting month. We held the first Sugar Youth
> Summit in Montevideo, organized by Daniel Francis and Jose Miguel
> Garcia and generously hosted by ANEP. The event featured a day-long
> symposium and series of workshops, including ones on Turtle Art,
> Butia, and how to write a Sugar activity. One teacher who attended the
> Turtle Art workshop exclaimed that she could not believe the progress
> she made.
>
> The event was attended by youths from Uruguay and Paraguay and
> educators and developers from as far away as Nicaragua and Colombia.
> We had an Argentine contingent as well.
>
> The symposium and workshops were held on Software Freedom Day. Given
> the number of Python programmers in attendance, it occurred to me that
> we should petition the city of Montevideo to rename itself Monty
> Python (after whom the language was named) for Software Freedom Day
> each year.
>
> The day before the symposium Gonzalo Odiard, Mariana Herrera, Jose
> Miguel, and I visited a school for children with special needs. As a
> result, during the code sprint that followed the symposium, we wrote
> three new activities that have their content and user interface
> tailored to the school's population. Lorena Paz from Argentina, also
> in attendance, resurfaces a number of issues around accessibility that
> we will consider in the coming months as well.
>
> Coincident with the weekend of hacking was a robo-Sumo contest at
> FING. It was a good opportunity to spend time with Andres Aguirre and
> Alan Aguiar of Butia fame and to recruit some new talent. Several of
> the more competitive kids joined us in the workshops. They took a
> special interest in Turtle Blocks 3D, one of the Google Summer of Code
> projects that is coming into its own.
>
> Gonzalo and I also got a chance to meet with a group of teachers
> conviened by Jose Miguel at his office at ANEP. These teachers are
> engaged in various project-based learning initiatives across the
> country. Really good work -- utilizing the computer as a tool to
> enhance authentic inquiry by the children. I look forward to continued
> interactions with them.
>
> 2. At the workshop, Martin Abente presented the initial plans for
> Sugar 104. (Martin has generously offered to be the release manager.)
> The new features under consideration can be found at [1].
>
> We'll be discussing these features in an online meeting on 2 October
> at 13 UTC. Please join us on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting.
>
> 3. I've been working on polishing up the Turtle Blocks 3D code over
> the past few weeks. There are a number of improvements from where we
> (Anubhav and I) left things this summer. Notably, the interface
> between Turtle Blocks and Blender is much richer. You can export .OBJ
> files from Turtle and import them into Blender and export .OBJ files
> from Blender and import them into Turtle. Currently I am working on
> adding a 3D cursor, which I designed and rendered in Turtle Blocks 3D
> itself. See [2] for a preview.
>
> 4. I've been working on a new activity similar to the Portfolio
> activity that is geared towards reflection. Like Portfolio, it draws
> upon Journal items that have been starred. It also allows the user to
> create reflections unrelated to any Journal items. The presentation is
> quite different from Portfolio, which is modeled after a slide show.
> Reflect is more like a stream, similar to the news feeds in Facebook
> and Google+. The stream supports comments and attaching media, and it
> can be searched by #tags. A preview is available at [3]. Feedback most
> welcome.
>
> 5. It is time to begin preparing for the annual Sugar Labs Oversight
> Board election (AKA SLOBs). Four (4) seats are open (due to staggered
> seat terms) for election / re-election to the Sugar Labs Oversight
> Board for 2013-2014, those of Daniel Francis, Gonzalo Odiard, Adam
> Holt, and Claudia Urrea. Please let me know if you are interested
> running for one of our board seats and also, please add your self to
> the candidates' wiki page [4]. Also, since only members receive
> ballots, please be sure to sign up for membership by following the
> instructions in the wiki [5]. Finally, we need help running the
> election itself. Please contact me (or Luke Faraone) if you are
> interested in helping.
>
> === In the community ===
>
> 6. Several of us will be in the Bay Area for the Google Summer of Code
> summit in late October. In conjunction with that event, we'll be
> holding a code sprint to look at the collaboration stack. If
>
> 7. The next Turtle Art Day event will be a workshop at the ??? School
> in Summerville. Carolyn Meeks is hosting the event. I've been busy
> making Sugar-on-a-Stick USB keys to give the kids. (I'm using Ruben
> Rodriguez's Trisquel TOAST image [6], which has an up-to-date copy of
> Turtle Blocks.)
>
> We are also planning a Turtle workshop in San Francisco in October.
>
> === Tech Talk ===
>
> 8. Lionel Laské recently announced the fourth version (0.4) of
> Sugarizer, a taste of Sugar for any device [7]. Sugarizer reproduces
> the main features of Sugar in HTML5/JavaScript. It is available from a
> browser or as an Android application. Lionel presents Sugarizer in a
> talk at SugarCamp Paris [8].
>
> 9. Sebastian Silva and Laura Vargas recently announced that > 20000
> children are now using Sugar Network. Tip of the hat to Aleksey Lim
> who has been working diligently behind the scenes on the project.
>
> === Sugar Labs ===
>
> 10. Please visit our planet at [9].
>
> -walter
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>
> --
>
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.104/Feature_List
> [2] http://github.com/Anubhav-J/turtleart.git
> [3] http://github.com/walterbender/reflect.git
> [4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/2014-2015-candidates
> [5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Members#Applying_for_membership
> [6] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trisquel_On_A_Sugar_Toast
> [7] http://sugarizer.org
> [8] http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1rvdma_sugarcamp-3-sugarizer-what-if-sugar-could-be-on-every-device_school
> [9] http://planet.sugarlabs.org



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