[Sugar-devel] [Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2012-02-02

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Fred juma <fredwakks at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Bungoma OLPC HIV/AIDS  XO project has introduced more activities.Now there
> is internet connection on XO for children in primary Schools.Community
> outreach using XO machines has been introduced.the rural community is so
> excited.This courtesy of Sandra Thaxter of Solutions in USA.She is visiting
> the Kenyan OLPC XO projects to ensure there success.Hands of Charity has
> reached over 7 schools in Bungoma Kenya.The Maths programme has progressed
> too.I has changed the perfomance in Maths in Butonge Primary School in
> Bungoma County.Its a very good idea for learners.
>

Very interested to learn more about what activites you find useful and more
about the HIV/AIDS-specific efforts.

regards.

-walter

>
> --- On *Thu, 2/2/12, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>* wrote:
>
>
> From: Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2012-02-02
> To: community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org
> Cc: "iaep" <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>, "Sugar-dev Devel" <
> sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Date: Thursday, February 2, 2012, 2:10 PM
>
> == Sugar Digest ==
>
> 1. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks
> last weekend. I'm actually quite intrigued by the potential. So far, I
> have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake,
> and a chocolate chip cookie), where each object has an associated
> simple polynomial with value for calories, protein, carbohydrates,
> fiber, and fat. These values are respectable on the help palette and
> there are inspector blocks that can get these values as numeric values
> in Turtle Block programs. You can do arithmetic operations on the
> object, e.g., banana * 3 + cookie / 2 and you can use the component
> values in other operations, e.g., forward by get_calories apple.
> Finally, there is an eat method that consumes the nutritional values
> fed to it and accumulates aggregate totals for each component. Using
> those values, I wrote a simple Weight Watchers(TM) "Points"
> calculator. You can play with all of this by downloading the plugin
> from [1].
>
> Next up is to create a palette with foods that are actually meaningful
> within the context of a deployment. There is a nice database to map
> foods to their nutritional components available at [2] so the real
> work is coming up with a representative list of foods and the artwork
> for the blocks. Anyone one interested in exploring this further with
> me?
>
> A screen shot is available at [3].
>
> 2. I am a little late in relaying this, but Caryl Bigenho wrote up a
> nice summary of SCaLE 10X a week ago. You can read about it here: [4]
>
> 3. I am please to announce that Robert Fadel will be taking over as
> finance coordinator for Sugar Labs. Robert has a wealth of
> professional experience in finance and, having previously been a part
> of the core team at One Laptop per Child, he is very familiar with
> Sugar Labs and its mission. Robert has been in communication with
> Bradley Kuhn at the SFC in order to get brought up to speed on our
> finances--Bradley had been distracted by an end of year audit report,
> so things are a bit behind on the finance front. Once he gets the lay
> of the land, I am certain that Robert will have many recommendations
> on how we can improve our financial processes. Robert and Bradley both
> have expressed interest in helping Sugar Labs identify funding
> opportunities.
>
> 2. John Tierney spent the fall semester working closely with a team of
> students participating in the OWL Jr. project at Oakland University
> under the supervision of Dr. Dana Driscoll. The students evaluated
> different aspects of Sugar and the use of Sugar in the classroom and
> have written up very thoughtful recommendations. John is working with
> them to get these materials into the wiki and to mine them for
> potential feature requests. Stay tuned.
>
> === In the community ===
>
> 6. There will be an eduJAM! in the  week of May 7-12 in Montevideo.
> Details to follow.
>
> 7. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo
> (May 16-18).
>
> === Tech Talk ===
>
> 8. The patches for new features for Sugar 0.96 [5] have (for the most
> part) landed. Under the hood, we'll see a migration to GTK-3. This is
> particularly important in "future-proofing" Sugar, ensuring that we
> remain in sync with our upstream and opens the door to much of the
> work in the GNOME community around topics such as accessibility and
> touch. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this major
> effort. Other new features include a global text-to-speech mechanism,
> written by Gonzalo Odiard. You'll be able to highlight text in any
> activity and send it to the voice synthesizer with a simple keyboard
> shortcut. Manuel Quiñones and Simon Schampijer have been porting
> Browse to Webkit as its back end. Simon helped me with "write to
> journal anytime", a feature that enables the user to takes notes
> stored in the Sugar journal from within any activity. And Sascha
> Silbe, Anish Mangal, and Aleksey Lim have added proxy configuration to
> the network entry in the Sugar control panel. Lots of QA to do, but
> the heavy lifting is done.
>
> === Sugar Labs ===
>
> Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion
> on the IAEP mailing list:
>
> 2012 Jan 21st-27th [6] (41 emails)
> 2012 Jan 14th-20th [7] (28 emails)
>
> Visit our planet [8] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
>
> ----
>
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Food-plugin.tar.gz
> [2] https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker
> [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/0/01/Food-plugin.png
> [4] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-January/014837.html
> 0.96/Feature_List
> [6] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2012-Jan-21-27-som.jpg
> [7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2012-Jan-14-20-som.jpg
> [8] http://planet.sugarlabs.org
>
> -walter
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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>


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