[SoaS] Madison Elementary Sugar Project

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Kevin,

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:36 PM, Brooks, Kevin <Kevin.Brooks at ndsu.edu> wrote:
> Mel and Peter found a blog I am co-authoring with a graduate student in my
> department, Chris Lindgren.
> http://fargoxo.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/sugar-on-a-stick-lingers-initial-response/
> The two of us are trying to help a near-by elementary school explore the
> value of Sugar. The school is working towards a OLPC ratio, and they just
> got a shipment of netbooks plus Sugar on a Stick.  Initial exploration with
> the Tech Team has been fun, but we have some questions.

Excellent to hear from you on the mailing list. We'll do all we can to
help you get a pilot up and running.

> 1. USB capacity. Madison Elementary used a 4GB USB drive, but after
> imagining, the stick had less than 500 MBs left for expansion.

Its been a while since I've looked at this close up. What version of
SoaS are you currently testing. It doesn't sound too far off but 500Mb
is quite a bit of space for activity usage.

> 2. USB reliability. We aren’t optimistic about the sticks lasting for a
> whole semester, let alone a whole year.

There's a lot of variation in quality of USB sticks. The cheap $2 ones
aren't always that reliable. There's also issues with overlay
partitions with SoaS using the default setup if your planning on using
them for a long period of time. If it helps I can put together a
procedure for you to do a "proper" install to USB which helps
alleviate the problem.

> 3. Neighborhood issues: who are all those people? And how did they manage to
> start a chat session with our 4th graders?

They will be other testers of sugar and other people involved in
pilots that are using the sugalabs jabber server, or other students
from your pilot using the local LAN. You can point the SoaS sticks at
a dedicated jabber server if you have the resources to run your own.

> 4. Groups: can a teacher easily establish a group at the start of a semester
> and have it be persistent? Can groups be quickly and easily reconfigured?

You'll need a school server to do these things.

> 5. File sharing: can any of the work done in Sugar be exported? We think the
> answer for Write is "yes" but we haven't tried it yet.

Yes. You can to USB or other storage. You'll need to provide more
details of what you need to achieve for this.

> I don’t know what else to ask developers, but we have lots of questions
> about curriculum integration, activity application, and would appreciate any
> kind of suggestion / directions.

I'll get back to you on this one.

Peter