[Sugar-devel] Sugar talk and Hackfest at IIT-M,India

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Vamsi Krishna
Davuluri<vamsi.davuluri at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was invited by the organizers of Shaastra
> http://www.shaastra.org/2009/site/events/coding/hackfest
> to conduct a Sugar Hackfest. And have been given roughly
> a day for the entire event.
>
> The number of participants, statistically, has been overwhelming
> in any event conducted at Shaastra.
>
> But on a percentile of 100, our estimation is 40 will be python newbies
> who don't know a thing about GTK or other APIs.
> 30 will be familiar with APIs and should be good enough with Python.
> 20 should be good enough with even GTK, and should be able to do
> a lot. And 10 should be exceptional people.
>
> But of course, there should be at least 1000 students there for this. ;)
>
> Taking into account this scenario:
>
> 1) Provide some training material on their site.
> 2) Provide a hacking exercise on the site.
> < More suggestions from you guys>
>
> Moving on to the program:
>
> In the morning there will be a talk, which I will give:
> I intend to give it roughly regarding these:
>
> 1) Sugar's motivation
> 2) Sugar's users
> 3) Future ( I will need some info regarding this)
>
> The technical part:
>
> 1) How sugar works. (the technologies used)
> 2) A walk on where what happens. (where to hack, and what to hack)
> 3) How to build a simple activity
>
> And for the actual Hack Fest:
>
> Get a list of suggested bugs from the Sugar Community.
> Divide them into levels.
>
> And,
> Get them to build a simple Game Activity. ( thanks to tomeu for the
> suggestion).
>
> < More suggestions welcome>

Might be good to organize some of the less engineering focused
participants to form language teams. We still need more localization
work done in the local languages.

>
> And lastly, there are a few questions which I was never able to answer
> properly,
>
> "Kids in the world are dying because of the lack of food and disease, how
> are a bunch of
> laptops and a Desktop going to save them? "
>
> I personally answered it like this: "We are trying to do what we can in the
> education industry,
> and by being open and free about it, we are also inviting everyone
> interested in the cause to
> join us. "

Another way of saying the same thing is: Education is part of the
solution to every problem facing the next generation. While we cannot
solve problems for them, we can give them tools so that they can
become a generation of problem solvers.

(I'd leave the open and free argument as part of your answer to the
next question.)

> "We already have desktops, how is sugar special"
>
> My answer: "Sugar is aimed at a very younger audience, and a very light
> machine. And besides,
> we are very young; soon there will be a boom"

(1) Sugar is designed to meet the needs of young children learning--it
puts an emphasis on guided discovery, collaboration, and reflection.
It is not just a repackaging of an 1970s-inspired office desktop. (2)
Sugar is built on free and open software because learning requires
more than just access to knowledge--it also requires the ability to
appropriate knowledge and put it to use. Sugar encourages and
facilitates such appropriation through mechanisms such as "view
source." (3) Sugar is designed to run on small, old, slow machines,
e.g., it can breath new life into existing in hardware.

>
> Is there a better answer to these?
>
> Thanks,
> Vamsi
>

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org