No subject

billing. We were able to get all but one of the mismatched castaway
PCs to boot, even some of which would not boot into Windows XP. (The
one machine that did not boot would not power on at all=97not something
we could fix with software.) We did have one machine with an invisible
cursor, but otherwise it ran fine. Sound worked on every machine that
had speakers. We were able to assign static IP addresses and every
machine was able to connect to the Internet. However something was
preventing collaboration to work: we could see each other, but not
share activities or interact with other users connected to
jabber.sugarlabs.org. We have some debugging to do. Ideally, we would
have brought a school server in to assign IP addresses, which would
have assured that at least local collaboration worked.

Caroline will be writing up detailed notes on the children's use of
Sugar throughout the day. The way things were organized, parents and
children were dropping in to the room at any time during the day. We
had in the room anywhere from two to six children, as young as two and
as old as seven or eight, while I was there. They went right to the
machines without any introduction to Sugar. Most of the machines were
either already running an activity or had the Home View visible.
Popular activities included Memorize, where some children went so far
as to design their own games, Jigsaw Puzzle, Turtle Art, Speak, Write,
and Mini Tam Tam.

While hardly a typical classroom setting, things went quite well with
this somewhat haphazard introduction to Sugar: the children were
engaged, as were their parents. However there was not time enough for
them to discover or exploit features such as the Journal. And since
collaboration was not working, all of the interactions were solo.
Undoubtedly there is some more scaffolding we can provide children and
parents new to Sugar. (We've already had some follow-up discussions on
how to best integrate examples into activities and how to make the
views and frame more readily discoverable on non-OLPC-XO hardware.)

=3D=3D=3DIn the community=3D=3D=3D

3. Lionel Laske announced that OLPC France will organize with Sugar
Labs the first Sugar Camp in Europe in Paris on May 16. Sign up at
http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/. Several workshop will be organized
all around the day: technical, pedagogical and documentation. The full
agenda is not closed so do not hesitate to submit a workshop proposal.
These events are fully free, thanks to AFUL and GDium.

There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See
[[Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009]]) where we will be
discussing initial plans for Sucrose 0.86.

=3D=3D=3DTech Talk=3D=3D=3D

4. Christian Marc Schmidt led a discussion of potential 0.86
improvements to the UI in a Design Team meeting this past weekend.
Together, we came up with a list of design goals to possibly include
in our development schedule for 0.86, with concrete tasks to be
accomplished in advance of SugarCamp. Christian added a meeting
summary on the wiki, along with a link to the transcript:
[[Design_Team/Meetings]]

5. Gary Martin and Aleksey Lim released a new version of
[http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4078 Labyrinth]
Paola Bruccoleri, a teacher from Uruguay has already tried the new
version and written a small tutorial about how to create mind maps
with it (See http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Imagen:Labyrinth6-Tutorial.pdf).
Aleksey also released a new version of Record (See
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4081).

6. In response to a discussion on IRC this week, we will experiment
with some mini Developer tutorials, with the goal of sharing
techniques on activity development. I'll launch the series with a
brief session on keyboard shortcuts this week on #sugar on
irc.freenode.net following Thursday's weekly developer meeting.

=3D=3D=3DSugar Labs =3D=3D=3D

7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see
[[:Image:2009-April-11-17-som.jpg]]).

-walter
--=20
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org