[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-10-12

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. I am behind in my blogging, but not because I haven't been writing.
I had a deadline for a National Science Foundation grant last week.
Diego Uribe and I submitted a grant entitled: "Developing creativity
skills through the Sugar learning platform: Empowering next generation
Scientists and Engineers." The gist of what we are proposing is to
embed deliberate creative-thinking dynamics into Sugar. We expect that
children engaged and collaborating in open-ended learning activities
will deliberately exercise and develop their creative thinking skills.

2. I've also been writing code. I chased down a number of bugs in
Turtle Art in anticipation of the 0.86 Release. One particularly nasty
bug involved an Overflow Error. Kids seem to love typing in big
numbers into the number blocks. When they do, they were causing
integer overflow errors, which was causing Turtle Art to freeze. I
added a work-around in Version 73—hopefully things will be a bit more
robust. I also got some help from Bernie Innocenti and Simon
Schampijer in resolving a problem that had been nagging at me since
last spring. I want to be able to launch Turtle Art from outside of
Sugar. Sounds easy enough, but I always had trouble with the way in
which the top-level window was interacting with the window manager in
my Gnome desktop. The fix turned out to be to use the maximize method
instead of the request-size method. Now I am able o use the standard
GTK menu toolbar in replacement of the Sugar toolbar when running
stand-alone.t With the exception of Journal access and collaboration,
everything else seems to just work. (I did enable opening and saving
projects to the file system, but I haven't yet enable access to rich
media using the Show block from outside of Sugar.) Simon also helped
me to clean up the artwork for German and French. Carlo Falciola has
been helping me with Italian and Raul Gutierrez Segales has been
helping me with Spanish.

3. And I have been writing some lectures. At the invitation of Donna
Benjamin, I prepared a video for the [http://open-edge.info/ Open Edge
2009] meeting about the new features in Sugar 0.86. I also prepared a
lecture about Sugar for the [http://qt.nokia.com/qtdevdays2009 QT
Developer Days] meeting in Munich that I am giving tomorrow.

4. On the way to Munich, I spent 24 hours in Berlin for a mini Sugar
Camp which Simon graciously hosted at his flat. Sebastian Dzallias
joined us as well. We ate cake, drank coffee, wrote code, and
discussed many of the pressing issues of the day, including
sustainability, activity bundles, 0.88 planning; we also sketched out
a plan for the Bolzano Sugar Camp.

5. Before crossing the pond, I made a trip to New York to visit Gerald
Ardito at the Pierre Van Cortlandt Middle School. It was a full day,
between teaching six fifth-grade classes, meetings with the principal,
vice principal, superintendent, and president of the school board. A
highlight was when I was greeted by a room full of children running
the Sugar Speak program in a simultaneous chorus of "Welcome Mr.
Bender." This was followed by an audio wave across the classroom. In a
debriefing with the teachers at the end of the day, several
interesting observations were made: (1) there was no gender bias in
the level of engagement (we were programming in Turtle Art); and (2)
multiple distinct strategies were used by the children, including
systematic modification of example code, asking from—and
receiving—help from a classmate, and an iterative process of
exploration of the various program elements. All three approaches led
to both the children and the teachers reaching a level of comfort and
pleasure with programming in short order.

=== Tech Talk ===

6. Rubén Rodríguez Pérez has released an updated
[http://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel-sugar_3.0RC_i686.iso Sugar on
Trisquel build] with Honey Activities installed. He also added a
graphical usb-creator application.

===Sugar Labs===

7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see
[[:File:2009-October-3-9-som.jpg|SOM]]).

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