[IAEP] OLPC and Sugar Labs -- a Sugar Labs perspective

[Walter Bender]

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) mission is "to create educational
opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child
with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and
software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning."

Sugar Labs has a complementary mission to serves as a support base and
gathering place for the community of educators and software developers
who want to extend the Sugar learning platform and create
Sugar-compatible applications.

Sugar, originally developed for the OLPC XO laptop, *is* "software
designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning." Sugar
provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the
world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet.
With Sugar, even the youngest learner will quickly become proficient
in using the computer as a tool to engage in authentic
problem-solving. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and
reflection, developing skills that help them in all aspects of life.

OLPC continues to pursue its laptop mission and is dedicating its
engineering resources to making the OLPC XO laptop more readily
deployable. The Sugar Labs community is refining Sugar and is
continues to work closely with OLPC in support of its mission.

The Sugar community is growing as it purses additional opportunities
for getting Sugar into the hands of children. As new opportunities
emerge, the roles of the two organizations are becoming more distinct:
(a) OLPC continues to ship Sugar on all of its laptops, as more
laptops are shipped, more Sugar is deployed; (b) over time, as the
number of non-OLPC deployments of Sugar increase, OLPC will be
directly supporting a relatively smaller proportion of the Sugar
development; and (c) many OLPC employees remain deeply committed as
individuals to advancing Sugar and they continue to make core
contributions to the Sugar community.

As both individuals and organizations we share the common goal of
getting great tools for thinking and learning into the hands of the
children of the world.


-walter

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