[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2012-10-06

[Sandra Thaxter]

Walter,  thanks so much for the changes in tracking Sugar Activity
frequency of use.  I think this will be helpful.  I am going to try to
get to SF, but unsure how I will do it.  Last minute I am afraid.


I like the journal features

On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 10:41 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> == Sugar Digest ==
>
> 1. Assessment is a topic that comes up again and again in discussions
> of Sugar. While there are several efforts under way to gather
> statistics about activity usage (See [1, 2] and [3], for example),
> most of those efforts are in service of everyone except the learner.
> In the spirit of "making learning visible", I modified an existing
> activity, Analyze Journal [4], written by Agustin Zubiaga Sanchez, in
> order give the Sugar user some feedback about their activity usage.
> Agustin had written the original activity to show free space in the
> Journal. I added two more views: one that displays a list of
> activities sorted by frequency of use; and one that shows statistics
> about block usage in Turtle Art activities. (The latter is based on a
> rubric developed jointly with Pacita Pena from Paraguayu Educa and
> Claudia Urrea from OLPC.) I am hoping that Analyze Journal and
> Portfolio (a previous effort to make learning visible) inspire the
> Sugar community to put more effort not just into gathering data for
> school administrators, but also in making reflection by the learners
> themselves part of the Sugar experience.
>
> One further note regarding Analyze Journal. I'd blogged recently about
> how youths who had grown up with Sugar were beginning to submit
> patches. In this case, the roles have reversed completely: I submitted
> the patch to Agustin.
>
> 2. In the keeping with spirit of the above discussion, a new datastore
> metadata tag [5] has landed in Sugar 0.98. The "launch-times" tag is
> updated whenever an activity is launched. This will enable the learner
> to answer questions such as "how often have I used this activity?";
> "do I use it in class, at home, or both?" Again, the goal is not to
> subsume the functionality potentially provided by [2], but to make the
> data available within Sugar itself more rich.
>
> 3. There has been a discussion on the IAEP list [6] about various
> strategies for using Turtle Blocks in support of robotics. The LEGO
> WeDo was discussed as one of several options currently available. It
> got me thinking that it may be time to finally add support for
> multiple WeDo devices. It is still beta, but please test the latest
> wedo_plugin [7]. In addition to supporting multiple devices, it also
> is a bit more robust in regard to plugging in and removing devices
> while the program is running. (In the first version of the code, the
> device had to be plugged in when Turtle Blocks launched. Now devices
> can be added and removed while Turtle Blocks is running.)
>
> === In the community ===
>
> 4. There are plans to hold the next OLPC SF summit in San Francisco
> the weekend of October 19-21. We are holding a Sugar Camp
> ''following'' the summit (Oct 22-24). Please register at [8].
>
> === Sugar Labs ===
>
> Visit our planet [9] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
>
> -walter
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>
>
> ----
>
> [1] http://git.sugarlabs.org/desktop/stats
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Platform_Team/Usage_Statistics
> [3] http://git.sugarlabs.org/ds-analysis-scripts
> [4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Analyze_Journal
> [5] http://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/commit/2a15fbc0f2269b1d61e5fa8ea723cb4848a8ee74
> [6] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-October/015642.html
> [7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/0/00/Wedo_plugin_2.tar.gz
> [8] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_SF_2012
> [9] http://planet.sugarlabs.org
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep



-- 
Sandra Thaxter
sandra at smallsolutionsbigideas.org
sandra at thaxter.net
(617) 320-1098
www.smallsolutonsbigideas.org.