[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2011-08-07

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==
1. We have a new Local Lab. A warm welcome to North Dakota State
University (NDSU). Their plan is “to do software development,
deployment, and support, including providing local and regional
technical and pedagogical support; creating new learning activities
and pedagogical practice; providing localization and
internationalization of software, content, and documentation; and
providing integration and customization services.” It is worth
checking out their blog, http://fargoxo.wordpress.com/, which has many
interesting observations about Sugar.

2. Following up on a thread begun in mid July
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-July/013736.html] the
Sugar oversight board passed a motion to empower Sugar Labs to award
certificates to developers to acknowledge and celebrate their
contributions to the Sugar Learning Platform. Several certificates
will be made available, based upon the area of contribution. The
certification mechanism is decentralized: the specific criteria for
certification will be determined by the Sugar Labs team coordinators;
in general, it will involve a repeated effort on behalf of the team's
goals at a high level of quality.

As an example, the Activity team may issue a Sugar Activity Developer
certificate to an individual who develops at least one Sugar activity
that is subsequently posted on the Sugar activity portal and be of
sufficient quality to be approved for public release. The activity
must also include internationalization, including the submission of a
POT file to the Translation Team, and documentation, including the
creation of a page in the wiki under the Activity category. As will
the Contributor certificates, sign off will be made by the associated
team coordinators, in this case the Activity team.

3. Gary Martin, Manuel Quiñones, Gonzalo Odiard, Rafael Ortiz, and I
have been busy working on the Sugar toolbars. You can follow our
progress here: [[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/ToolbarCatalog]].
Our goal is to provide a consistent framework for all activities and
to make sure that all of the Fructose activities have been ported to
the 0.86-style toolbars before the next releases from both OLPC and
AC.

4. As part of the toolbar cleanup, I could not resist adding a feature
to the Distance activity that I have wanted since the first time I saw
it demonstrated by Ben Schwartz. There is now a toolbar for adjusting
the units used – the default is still meters, but you can measure in
centimeters, inches, feet, or yards as well. In addition, you can use
the current distance being measured as your unit of measure, i.e.,
Distance will let you measure in 'Smoots' (See
[http:wikipedia.org/go/Smoots]). I also made an updated activity page
for Distance here:
[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Distance]].

5. The OLPC team in Australia has a new discussion portal that has
been seeing many posts from teachers using Sugar
([https://www.yammer.com/australianxoteachers]). One of the teachers,
Frank Van Den Boom, was looking for a Powerpoint equivalent in order
to let children manipulate pictures of currency. Van Den Boom has some
learning exercises relating to currency that involve building
equivalencies with different bills and coins. Of course, I immediately
thought of how Turtle Art might be used for such an exercise. After
doing the obvious: rendering images of money, I opted to write a plug
in that provides a palette of coins and bills that can be used as if
their were number blocks
[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Oz_currency.png]]; e.g. they can
be used with the various arithmetic operators and they can be used
with the various turtle commands. A silly but revealing example is
shown here [[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:US_currency.png]]. You
can download the plug ins for various currencies from here:
[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#currency]]

6. During a discussion
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-July/013831.html] about
curricula guidelines, Gary Martin generated a self-organizing map for
the Science Education Framework published by the United States
National Academies (See
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:K-12_science_education_framework_13165_som.jpg]).
I thought it would be interesting to how some other guidelines mapped,
so I asked him to generate some from the Newton Public Schools, a
well-regarded US system (See Curriculum Overview Documents for
Parents, "Your Child's Year in Grades K- 8"
[http://www3.newton.k12.ma.us/content/grade-level-curriculum]).
The results are fascinating, particularly the frequency of words such
as 'identify', 'understand', and, my favorite, 'appropriate'.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_K_2010_som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_1_2010_som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_2_2010_som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_3_2010_som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_4_2010_som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_5_2010_som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_6_2010_som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_7_2010_som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Grade_8_2010_som.jpg

=== In the community ===

7. Nickelodeon and MTV in conjunction with OLPC is staging an
international contest for the best narratives generated using Sugar
(See [[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Nick-MTV]] for details).

=== Tech Talk ===

8. Daniel Drake has created
[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3|a page in the wiki]] for
discussing the migration to GNOME 3.0. There is a section for The
Desktop Summit [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3/DesktopSummitActivities],
which is underway in Berlin. Raul and friends have already gotten a
Sugar Hello World running (See
[http://people.collabora.co.uk/~rgs/tmp/gtk3-activity-in-sugar.png]).

9. Hilaire Fernandes has announced Release 11.08 of DrGeo, which is
fully working with the latest stable Sugar release (See
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4323). Additional
features include:
* very easy user interface to keep/open sketches from a preview list;
* the canvas user interface is touch pad friendly;
* the rendering speed was improved. Hilaire is looking for help in
translation, especially for Spanish and English.

=== Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-July-9-15-som.jpg (29 emails)
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-July-16-22-som.jpg (41 emails)

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about
Sugar and Sugar deployments.

-walter