[IAEP] First steps with Sugar

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Zitat von Werner Westermann <wernerio at gmail.com>:

> Hello, regards from Santiago.
>
> We are beginning a short Sugar pilot deployment in the K-3 level (8-9
> years), using Mirabelle SoaS:
>
> http://cl.sugarlabs.org/go/Piloto_Florence_Nightingale_Macul
>
> We have focused on curricular work, exploring, selecting, prioritizing Sugar
> activities with the teacher. But we haven't thought of the initial encounter
> with Sugar.
>
> What do you suggest to do in class to get in touch on Sugar?, Any ideas,
> metaphors that could motivate of the environments, activities, journal,
> etc?, what activities to work on first?, preferring a exploratory or rather
> approach at first?

3 weeks ago at the Waveplace schools on St. John we only started with 
Sugar classes on the second or third day. Things we explored in 10 to 
20 minute slices at the beginning of each day (we had 90min 
after-school sessions at the schools) were:

* how to stop Activities + not having too many Activities running at 
once (since many first time users manage to bring their machines / XOs 
to a halt by having multiple copies of Activities running, depending on 
the hardware you're using this might be less of an issue however 
especially young children can also get confused by multiple instances 
of the same Activity)
* the Journal
* the different views (especially the 2 views on the Home View can be 
very confusing in my experience) combined with collaboration (using 
Chat as a simple example)
* Activity-of-the-day

We started each day by asking the children whether they had discovered 
something particularly interesting by themselves on the previous day. 
That led to some good discussions and their fellow pupils asking them 
how to do things.

Similarly we asked some children who quickly had a good understanding 
of things to explain how to do certain things, e.g. the aforementioned 
collaboration in Chat, to the rest of the class.

Last but not least: I've found (both on St. John and at the Austrian 
pilot project) that having a projector and screen on-hand to 
demonstrate how to use Sugar and some Activities was tremendously 
useful. Not sure how well equipped the classrooms you'll be working in 
are but if there's any chance to use a projector (even if it means 
having to bring one along every single day) then I'd wholeheartedly 
recommend it.

Hope that helps,
Christoph

--
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, olpcnews
url: www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com