[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2011-11-19

[Walter Bender]

On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 11:05 PM, Sebastian Silva
<sebastian at somosazucar.org> wrote:
> 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.

Glad to hear that things have gone well. I know from IRC that Bernie
and Chris have been giving their all. I have no doubt that other
Sugaristas are working hard as well. Nice to see some .que and .aym
strings landing.

-walter

-walter
>
> 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
>>
>
>



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