[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-02-24

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. I have spent much of the past two weeks finalizing the details of a
proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). We are
proposing to create hubs of international collaboration, leverage the
diverse capabilities of partner institutions, to conduct a
longitudinal study of the Sugar program on a global scale. Drafting
this proposal is a first step towards to goal of rallying universities
around the world to address some of the challenges I raised in a blog
entry last year “A page from the Hilbert playbook”. What attracted me
to this particular program, Partnerships for International Research
and Education (PIRE), is that it encourages international
collaboration. Sugar is global and to understand its impact, one needs
to work globally.

2. I finally heard from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that
http://directory.fsf.org/project/sugar/ is listed in their directory
of free software projects. I hadn't ever noticed that on their
homepage they say, "Free software is the foundation of a learning
society – where the tools we all use are free to share, study and
modify." Is the tip of their hat to learning new? In any case, it is
great to see them acknowledging the synergy between free software and
learning.

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

3. Mike Lee has posted some great photos from the DC Learning Club
meeting, where they tried booting SoaS on a variety of netbooks (See
http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157614277170318/).

=== Help Wanted / Help Received ===

4. It is dizzying trying to floow the pace of the activity leading up
to the release of 0.84. Simon Schampijer and the release team are
engaged in a testing sprint. You can join them on irc.freenode.net,
#sugar. Interwoven with the testing of 0.84 is a flurry of work on
Sugar on a Stick (SoaS)—indeed, much of testing is happening in that
environment: Thanks to the hard work of Sebastian Dziallas and the
SoaS team, Sucrose 0.83.6, the 0.84 Release Candidate 2, has find it's
way into Sugar on a Stick
(http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/1/Soas-200902231225.iso).
Aleksey Lim has been chasing down bugs seemingly across every package.
And Sayamindu Dasgupta and the localization team have been very
patiently updating the translations.

5. Christian Marc Schmidt has been making great progress on the new
static website (See
http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite). We
are still seeking more screenshots of the work of children using
Sugar, i.e., "authentic" Sugar images.

=== Tech Talk ===

6. Lionel Laské has been looking into the use of Mono as a Sugar
resource, opening up to us the .NET community. Please see his post,
“Mono on Sugar for dummies”, on the French .NET community site
(http://www.techheadbrothers.com/Articles.aspx/developper-mono-xo).

7. S. Page, in reminding us, "Don't bet against the browser", posted a
link to a Pippy-like tool for Javascript (See
http://billmill.org/static/canvastutorial/).

8. Sascha Silbe "finally managed to get Linux working" on his phone,
so he couldn't resist installing Sugar (See
http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04708.jpg,
http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04709.jpg,
http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04710.jpg, and
http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04711.jpg). Sascha says, "No, it
isn't really usable - only 64MB of physical RAM means swapping ~30MB
to SD just to start Sugar (no activities running). Sugar isn't
touchscreen-"compatible" as well (there are no "plain" movements, just
clicks and drags)." But it looks great.

=== Sugar Labs ===

9. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of
discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2009-February-14-20-som.jpg).

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