[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [Marketing] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 6:15 AM, Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi…
>
> Last year at SCaLE George Hunt helped me get Sugar running on my RPi.
> Because our booth was so busy, it took parts of both Saturday and Sunday to
> get it going. I then tried it when I got home and found that it was prone to
> stalls. Of course, this was back in late February and there may have been
> improvements since then. If so, please let me know where to find the
> download and instructions for installing.
>
> I would like to suggest we keep the idea of Sugar on the RPi in mind, but
> perhaps in a smaller, reduced size with only a few carefully selected
> Activities. Perhaps it could be called "A Taste Of Sugar."

I think there's a lot better cheap ARM dev boards out there that offer
a better experience and performance for the same price. Having been
actively involved in low level ARM stuff for well over 2 years I think
we should forget about it and spend time on the other cheap devices
that are more open and easier to support.

> Remember, the whole idea behind the RPi is to get young people involved in
> really learning about computers and computing and to do creative things with
> them. With this in mind, some of the Activities that could be part of a
> small version of Sugar might include Turtle Blocks for robotics, a small
> version of Tam Tam for experimenting with creating musical sounds and
> actually composing with loops (I realize even a tiny version of Tam Tam
> would be a huge undertaking, but very worthwhile), Pippy for learning
> Python, etc.

I don't think any of that is unachievable. If you use the Pidora image
for SoaS you can have it now. If you have any number of other cheap
ARM boards you can even have a full Sugar 0.100 on Fedora 20 _NOW_
will all of that!

> As we discuss where our group(s) should focus in the future, let's try not
> to get to bogged down in discussions of hardware platforms and software
> solutions. First and foremost we might want to consider the educational
> experience we want to make available to students. Hopefully, it will be
> something that fosters creativity, collaboration, and problem solving while
> making projects of all kinds imaginable.

We already have the basis of the educational experience from the
current releases of Sugar. In terms of HW I think we should use
upstream distros and let them care about the HW and work with one or
two of them to ensure that the Sugar experience on them is great OOTB
so that people can then focus on development of the platform. That's
what I've been doing with Fedora and Sugar for 5 years! IMO the sugar
OOTB there "just works"

Peter