[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2011-11-19

[Sebastian Silva]

Also today,
We'd like to share with the Sugar community our feeling of rejoice since
the objectives of the Sugar Camp Lima 2011 have been accomplished:
http://sugarcamp.somosazucar.org/

We're very grateful for the contribution of such a select team and very
proud to have contributed work to upstream projects.

Hopefully we'll make it to your next digest :P
Sebastian
somosAZUCAR
Sugar Labs Peru

El 20/11/11 00:04, Walter Bender escribió:
> == Sugar Digest ==
>
> 1. The Learning Team held a discussion about the Portfolio activity
> this week, which prompted me to make some enhancements. One request
> was the ability to export your portfolio to a PDF file. It turns out
> that Cairo supports a PDF surface, making it really easy to export
> PDF. So one nice by product of moving Sugar activities to Cairo
> graphics -- which is a necessary step in our migration to GTK3 -- is
> that it will be much easier to enable activities to export files to
> the Journal for printing. The other feature I added was the ability to
> make voice annotations on each page in your portfolio. These voice
> notes are played back when the portfolio is viewed. They are also
> saved went the contents are exported to HTML. Alas, PDF does not
> support audio, as far as I know. Please try Portfolio [1] and give me
> feedback as to how I can improve it.
>
> 2. Monday is the deadline for new feature proposals for Sugar 0.96.
> There are a number of proposals that have already been submitted (See
> [2]). Gonzalo Godiard and I have aggregated a number of proposals
> concerning the Journal in a collector page [3]. These proposed
> features are a result of the past month of discussion with the
> Learning Team. Additional feedback on these and all of the new-feature
> proposal is most welcome. Please add to the discussion on the "Talk"
> page of each individual proposal.
>
> 3. I mentioned last week that I wrote a plugin for Turtle Blocks that
> adds a palette for creating models for the Physics activity. (Physics
> uses a 2D engine called Box2D [4].) I've made a few additions this
> week, including a block that creates a gear. Building a simple machine
> should be a bit easier than trying to use the tools exposed by
> Physics. Of course, there are limits to what one can do with a simple.
> Working directly with sensors may be a more productive approach. But I
> have to say, it is really fun to create Box2D models in Turtle Blocks.
> (See [5] for more details on how to load the plugin and run it.)
>
> It is difficult to strike a balance between giving the student a tool
> and giving the student the skills to make tools. I've wrestled with
> this quite a bit in Turtle Art over the years. Lately, I am leaning
> more towards exposing more functionality in the form of predefined
> blocks than asking that these blocks be built by the user. For
> example, I recently added blocks for getting mouse x,y coordinates,
> whereas before, I shipped Python code that could be loaded by the user
> to accomplish the same thing. Of course, View Source is still
> available. But where to draw the line is not obvious, at least to me.
>
> 4. Cherry Withers pointed out Mr Steve's Exploratorium Blog earlier
> this week, but I thought it merited mentioning it again (See [6]).
>
> === Sugar Labs ===
>
> Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion
> on the IAEP mailing list.
>
> 2011 Nov 5th - Nov 11 (80 emails) [7]
>
> Visit our planet [8] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
>
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Portfolio
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features
> [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Journal_features_for_0.96
> [4] [http://box2d.org/
> [5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Plugins
> [6] http://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html
> [7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Nov-5-11.jpg
> [8] http://planet.sugarlabs.org
>
>
> -walter
>