[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2013-03-19

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. We need to finalize our application to Google Summer of Code by the
end of next week. I've put a rough draft of our application in the
wiki (See [1]). Most important is to finalize our list of project
ideas and mentors. Please add your ideas to the wiki to [2].

2. I've been on the road (and ice) these past few weeks. I gave the
keynote at GoOpen Arctic, and had a chance to hobnob with the likes of
Richard Stallman and Håkon Wium Lie. It was quite the adventure since
the conference was held in two venues: Tromsø and Longyearbyrn (the
latter being in Svalbard at 78:15 North). Lots of enthusiasm for Sugar
and interest in connected the young end of our developer community
with kids in Norway. I came back to Boston and almost immediately
headed to West Coast to attend Pycon. I was the keynote for a new
Education Summit at Pycon, organized by Naomi Ceder. I had a chance to
catch up with a number of old friends, including Raúl Gutiérrez
Segalés, Mel Chua, Stephen Jacobs and Jeff Elkner and the RIT Sugar
team. As usual, I gave my talk using Turtle Art, and afterwards, we
discussed the gulf between block-based graphical programming
environments and text-based environments such as Python. One idea that
emerged was to add an export-Python option to Turtle Art (similar to
the export-Logo option that already is part of the package). Raúl and
I started writing some code that looks promising. Stay tuned. Then off
to Washington DC with Claudia Urrea for a meeting with the
Inter-American Development Bank to discuss the use of Sugar in
Honduras. We kicked around a lot of good ideas about mentoring and
building bridges between teachers.

3. Martin Abente (with a little help from his friends) has gotten the
beginnings of a Twitter Web Service [3] working from the Sugar
Journal. Simply invoke the Copy-To Twitter menu item, and your Journal
entry is sent as a tweet. There is some work to be done in registering
the service per user and some housekeeping regarding pulling replies
into the comments field of the Journal, but it is already in pretty
decent shape, thanks to the Web Services framework that Raúl and I
developed last month. (I am hoping that the framework is reviewed and
accepted into Sugar so that it will be easier for people to test and
enhance it.)

=== In the community ===

4. Guzmán Trinidad has written a book about Physics on the XO (See
[4]). It features many of the projects that Guzmán and Tony Forster
have been developing, using a combination of Measure and Turtle
Blocks.

=== Sugar Labs ===

Visit our planet [5] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

[1] http://wiki/sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2013/Application
[2] http://wiki/sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2013
[3] https://git.sugarlabs.org/+redwood-city/sugar/social-sugar/trees/master/extensions/web/twitter
[4] https://sites.google.com/site/solymar1fisica/fisica-con-xo-investigacion-/fisica-con-xo-el-libro
[5] http://planet.sugarlabs.org
-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org