[sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-08-11

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Worth a read: Dave Farning sent a pointer to an Open University
report on "the effectiveness of a FLOSS-like learning community in
formal educational settings" (Please see
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/FLOSSCOM_Wp4_PHASE2_REPORT_d1.pdf).
While the focus is on higher education, what I found of particular
relevance is the discussion of collaboration and reflection in FOSS
projects and its potential transfer to the classroom.

=== Community jams and meetups ===

2. Game Jam Peru: Hern?n Paches announces an upcoming Game Jam at the
Universidad de San Mart?n de Porres in Lima on 23?25 October.

===Tech Talk===

3. Sucrose final release: Simon Schampijer reports that the Sugar
community is working on the final release (0.82) for the Sucrose
(Please see http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Timeline).

4. Dr. Geo: Hilaire Fernandes is looking for feedback on some
screencasts he has been preparing to explain the DrGeo features
(Please see http://community.ofset.org/index.php/Screencast_DrGeo).
Swap space

5. "Hard fun": Mark Goadrich and his student Nolan Baker are seeking
feedback on three educational games (COBBLE, Space Tag and Cell
Management) they have been developing for Sugar this summer (Please
see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/COBBLE ;
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Space_Tag ; and
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cell_Management).

6. x2o: Alex Levenson reports the first release of x2o, a physics
problem solving game in which you create Rube Goldberg contraptions in
order to get the O to land on top of the X (Please see
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o).

7. Sugar-presence-service: Guillaume Desmottes reports that a new
release of the Suagr Presence Service is available (Please see
https://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-presence-service/sugar-presence-service-0.82.1.tar.bz2).
This is the "Woo I'm stable!" release.
	
8. Activity updates:
Read 49
Terminal 15
Log 12
Pippy 24
Calculate 21
Etoys 87
Write 57
Browse 95
Journal 97

9. Wine: John Gilmore is seeking feedback as to what class of
MS-Windows programs would be of high-priority for Sugar users. (Please
see http://winehq.org/SugaredWine for more information about Wine, a
GNU LGPL licensed implementation of the Windows API on top of X and
Unix and Sugar).

10. Translations: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports "significant support" for
18 langaguages (not including English) for Sugar 0.82:

Language	% of translated strings
----
Greek		100
Sinhala		100
Turkish		100
Dutch		99
German		99
Kinyarwanda	98.5
Spanish		97.5
Nepali		97.5
Italian		97
Kreyol		97
Marathi		96.5
Mongolian	95.5
French		95
Telugu		94
Urdu		93.5
Slovenian	82.5
Dari		80
Pashto		80

Thanks to all the translation teams for their hard work.

=== Sugar Labs ===

11. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM
from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
<a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-August-02-08-som.jpg">SOM.jpg</a>).
Sugar and Work are surrounded by OLPC, lab, education, development,
and community.

-walter