[Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2009-06-10

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest===

1. In a week full of accomplishments, one event stands out. Caroline
Meeks has received a grant from the Gould Foundation in support of the
Sugar-on-a-Stick pilot at a Boston public elementary school. We'll
begin the pilot by participating in a five-week summer program, which
will inform a school-wide program in the fall. In a related effort, we
will also be working at a Boston public middle school program; these
students will be making "how to" videos of Sugar as guides for the
elementary school students and teachers.

2. María del Pilar Sáenz announced the official launch of Fundación
Sugar Labs Colombia [http://co.sugarlabs.org]. The foundation, the
first "official" local lab, has been busy: working in partnership with
Foundation Buinaima, they havs have a project approved by the
Secretaría de Educación de Bogotá to install and use Sugar in 12
public schools. They have already been working with more than 30
teachers, with whom they will be exploring pedagogy in the classroom
over th next six months. The foundation will also help with the use of
additional resources, e.g., wikis and blogs, with the goal of the
teachers becoming part of the Sugar community.

3. Jeff Elkner has gotten Sugar Labs DC off to a great start this
summer: he has launched an intern program modeled after Google Summer
of Code. Pairing students and developers is a great opportunity for
learning and a great way to grow the community.

4. Aleksey Lim has uploaded Bruno Coudoin's award-winning GCompris
activities to http://actvities.sugarlabs.org. The inclusion of these
100+ activities doubles the number of activities available for
download from our download site.

5. Some wonderful guides to using Sugar activities
[http://www.perueduca.edu.pe/olpc/OLPC_fichasfasc.html] has been made
available online by the Ministry of Education in Peru. Even if you
don't speal Spanish, it is worth looking at this material.

===Help Wanted===

6. David (nubae) Van Assche organized a collaboration testing sprint;
together we exercised a number of activities on the openSUSE Sugar
image. We plan to continue testing again on Wednesday, 17 June, at
20:00 UTC, irc.freenode.org, channel #sugar-collaboration.

===In the community===

7. If you are planning to attend Linuxtag [http://linuxtag.org] (24–27
June in Berlin) please add your name to the wiki
[[Marketing_Team/Events/LinuxTag2009#Attendees|]]. There will be a
Sugar Labs booth [[Marketing_Team/Events/LinuxTag2009#Sugar_Booth]].

8. Other upcoming events include FOSSED [http://www.fossed.com/] in
Bethel, Maine, 24–26 June and NECC
[http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2009/] in Washington DC, 28 June–1
July.

9. Jim Gettys is looking for submissions to the Linux Plumbers
Conference, 23–25 September 2009 in Portland, Oregon USA. His
particularly interested in the Sugar collaboration framework.

10. There is an article about Sugar in the latest issue of LWN
[http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/336910/3878a88c0c27f977/].

===Tech Talk===

11. Sebastian Dziallas announced this new Sugar-on-a-Stick snapshot
([http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200906031834.iso
Live Image], [http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/appliances/soas2-20090603.zip
Virtual Appliance],
[http://people.sugarlabs.org/sdz/soas-boot-20090603.iso Boot Helper]).
Features include:

* Fixed DPI size issue on the XO - should look better now;
* Included Library and Tux Paint; updated Record activity;
* updated Turtle Art to the latest version.

12. Thanks to the efforts of Aleksey Lim, activities.sugarlabs.org
uses email notifications to announce new releases. So activity
developer needs only upload new activity/new-activity-version, fill in
release notes field and this information will be sent to sugar-devel@
mailing list.

===Sugar Labs ===

13. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
[[Image:2009-May-30-Jun-5-som.jpg]]).

-walter

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