No subject

We were able to get all but one of the mismatched castaway PCs to boot, even
some of which would not boot into Windows XP. (The one machine that did not
boot would not power on at all-not something we could fix with software.) We
did have one machine with an invisible cursor, but otherwise it ran fine.
Sound worked on every machine that had speakers. We were able to assign
static IP addresses and every machine was able to connect to the Internet.
However something was preventing collaboration to work: we could see each
other, but not share activities or interact with other users connected to
jabber.sugarlabs.org. We have some debugging to do. Ideally, we would have
brought a school server in to assign IP addresses, which would have assured
that at least local collaboration worked.

Caroline will be writing up detailed notes on the children's use of Sugar
throughout the day. The way things were organized, parents and children were
dropping in to the room at any time during the day. We had in the room
anywhere from two to six children, as young as two and as old as seven or
eight, while I was there. They went right to the machines without any
introduction to Sugar. Most of the machines were either already running an
activity or had the Home View visible.
Popular activities included Memorize, where some children went so far as to
design their own games, Jigsaw Puzzle, Turtle Art, Speak, Write, and Mini
Tam Tam.

While hardly a typical classroom setting, things went quite well with this
somewhat haphazard introduction to Sugar: the children were engaged, as were
their parents. However there was not time enough for them to discover or
exploit features such as the Journal. And since collaboration was not
working, all of the interactions were solo.
Undoubtedly there is some more scaffolding we can provide children and
parents new to Sugar. (We've already had some follow-up discussions on how
to best integrate examples into activities and how to make the views and
frame more readily discoverable on non-OLPC-XO hardware.)

===In the community===

3. Lionel Laske announced that OLPC France will organize with Sugar Labs the
first Sugar Camp in Europe in Paris on May 16. Sign up at
http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/. Several workshop will be organized all
around the day: technical, pedagogical and documentation. The full agenda is
not closed so do not hesitate to submit a workshop proposal.
These events are fully free, thanks to AFUL and GDium.

There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See
[[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009]]) where we will be discussing
initial plans for Sucrose 0.86.

===Tech Talk===

4. Christian Marc Schmidt led a discussion of potential 0.86 improvements to
the UI in a Design Team meeting this past weekend.
Together, we came up with a list of design goals to possibly include in our
development schedule for 0.86, with concrete tasks to be accomplished in
advance of SugarCamp. Christian added a meeting summary on the wiki, along
with a link to the transcript:
[[Design_Team/Meetings]]

5. Gary Martin and Aleksey Lim released a new version of
[http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4078 Labyrinth] Paola
Bruccoleri, a teacher from Uruguay has already tried the new version and
written a small tutorial about how to create mind maps with it (See
http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Imagen:Labyrinth6-Tutorial.pdf).
Aleksey also released a new version of Record (See
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4081).

6. In response to a discussion on IRC this week, we will experiment with
some mini Developer tutorials, with the goal of sharing techniques on
activity development. I'll launch the series with a brief session on
keyboard shortcuts this week on #sugar on irc.freenode.net following
Thursday's weekly developer meeting.

===Sugar Labs ===

7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the
IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-April-11-17-som.jpg]]).

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