[IAEP] Activity Team Report

[Gary Martin]

Sugar Teams Update Report, September 2011

Name of team: Activity Team

Mission statement: The Activity Team develops and maintains many of the activities available for Sugar. We encourage independent developers to write and maintain activities, and we support them in their efforts. Our goal is to ensure that Sugar provides a complete set of high quality educational, collaborative, constructivist activities.

Short Term Goals (three–six months):
1. Finish implementation of the UI review with guidance of the Design Team.
2. Write a criteria for inclusion of activities into the core activities group.
3. Create a list of core activities, with the maintainers responsible for each one of them.
4. Re-start Activity Team IRC meetings.
5. Look to the Development Team for a best practice recommendation for GTK3, PyGI activity migration and Sugar 0.96 red flag day changes.

Medium Term Goals (6 months–one year):
1. Promote co-maintainership of Core Activities.
2. Identify code repeated in activities, and useful in sugar-toolkit, and help to improve it, doing easier the work to activity developers.
3). Try to gather more feedback on actual activity use by children in deployments to help focus development effort (Journal metadata analysis, teacher feedback, deployment team feedback).
4). Look to the Design Team to help work towards adoption of UI changes needed for the support of touch based interfaces.

Long Term Goals (one year–three years):
1. Design, develop, or support an activity (or Sugar shell component) useful to edit/create activities.

What does the team see as its constraints from being more successful
in its Mission? Finding developers willing to maintain activity code over the longer term.

What are you doing to try to resolve the constraint? We will restart periodic IRC meetings (probably once a fortnight) to try and re-engague activity developers.

What can Sugar Labs 'central' or the community do to help? Get involved in some way with Activity testing, review, feedback, opening bug or enhancement tickets, documentation, lesson plan writing, video tutorials – so that activity developers are not working in a vacuum. More feedback from the bottom up would be wonderful (children/teacher/deployment -> activity developers)

Gonzalo & Gary