[IAEP] SoaS with Rosie's Girls

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 17:15, Nicco Eneidi<nbotticelli at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, August 7th, I presented Sugar to fifteen girls ages 10-13 who
> were participants in the Rosie's Girls Summer Program. Rosie's Girls was
> designed to build confidence in young female students and to introduce them
> to non traditional career paths that they may not otherwise have been
> encouraged to explore on their own.
>
> The time I had with the students was limited (I had to beg my boss to let me
> get away for an hour from imaging computer labs in other schools) and the
> mobile laptop lab that we used had not had their batteries charged prior so
> we had to quickly steal extension cords from the janitors for power. The
> camp was held at the local high school so most classrooms were unavailable
> and so we had to set up in the atrium.
>
> Using the atrium was a poor choice because it turned out to be a very loud
> room and for someone to hear you from fifteen feet away you almost have to
> yell; once you get a few giggly girls talking to each other it is near
> impossible to understand anything.
>
> I introduced them to Turtle Art, Speak, and the Physics activities. Again,
> time was very limited so I wasn't able to go much into detail about things
> but they were able to spend some time on each activity. Unfortunately the
> network was down in the building and I wasn't able to bring my own wifi
> router like I had planned. I think if we had been able to get online or at
> least on the network that some of the things we did would have been able to
> be expanded much better if they got to explore the collaborative aspects of
> Sugar.
>
> At the same time all three of the camp counselors had disappeared while I
> was presenting Sugar and I think part of the noise issue was because they
> had taken off and the students didn't really know me at all and so maybe a
> sort of "substitute teacher" energy was occuring which made the noise issue
> worse.
>
> Some students were into it and I think understood what was going on while
> others were fairly confused as to what they were supposed to be doing and
> why. I can imagine going from welding and working on engines one moment to
> playing with a new operating system the next can be somewhat confusing and
> not as exciting (Welding, sparks! fire!).
>
> At the end I explained how to to safely handle the flash drives and how they
> may be able to boot from them at home or other locations and they got to
> keep the drives.
>
> Later one of the councelors came back to help me clean up and apparently the
> students were actually quite excited about Sugar and were all talking about
> it in the next classroom. Sometimes it's hard to tell if a kid is into
> something and they may not show it to your face but later on it turns out
> they really enjoyed it. I'm still trying to learn how to pick up on these
> cues and what they mean.

Congrats!

> So, two questions about Sugar for possible future presentations:
>
> 1. Can Sugar be run in some sort of ad-hoc mode where laptops with wifi can
> connect directly to each other and create their own network without a
> central AP/router?

Yes, but this feature is scheduled to land in the next Sugar release
in about 3 months. That said, you can preview this feature on Sugar
0.84 (Strawberry SoaS) by applying the patch linked from here:

http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/05/ad-hoc-wireless-networks-in-sugar.html

> 2. If all computers are connected to a network without internet access is it
> true that if you take out of the jabber server address in the settings menu
> that the computers on that section of the local network should see
> eachother? If so, how well does this actually work? Is it reliable to try it
> with a group of students?

Sugar can use mDNS to discover other machines _in the same network
segment_. People get confused because the distinction between a
network segment and the whole local network is not obvious to them.

This is the same underlying technology in Apple's Bonjour, so both
should work in the same network environment.

That said, we seem to have some reliability issues that are trying to
track down:

http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/928

Regards,

Tomeu

> For more info about the camp you can check out their site:
> www.rosiesgirls.org
> Thank You!
> -Nicco
>
> --
> Niccolo Botticelli Eneidi
>
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