[Sugar-devel] [support-gang] Fwd: Re: Sugar future (was Re: Re: [DESIGN] Single instance activities)
Caryl Bigenho
cbigenho at hotmail.com
Fri Apr 12 17:40:29 EDT 2013
Hi Folks...
Notes from Sunny SoCal...
Another reason to "Androidize" Sugar... whenever someone asks me (as recently as last evening) about the XO Learning Tablet, they assume Sugar will run on it. I have to tell them, "no, it's an Android platform, but we hope to get Sugar running on Android devices soon" (as per the Sugar Labs goals from the start of the year). They are all pleased with that idea.
What is good/important about Sugar? Ability to collaborate. Integration of Activities so several can be combined creatively in PBL (Project Based Learning). The Activities I think are particularly good examples of this are Labyrinth and FotoToon where students can bring together all sorts of resources to create a wonderful project about any topic and level needed. They are great for history, language arts, science, etc. Some of us saw several excellent examples of Labyrinth used in this fashion when we visited schools in Uruguay.
Another Activity that fits in the same useful category as Labyrinth and FotoToon is Memorize. For that, adding a simple users guide would make it possible for anyone, children, teachers, or parents to create memorize games on any topic they liked.
To go with these, students need Activities to create the content they will need... for example, Record, Paint, Write, and Wikis where they can look up the content they can't get on their own.
Would it be possible to, instead of trying to port all of Sugar to Android, start with a few key Activities? If someone who is a whiz at this sort of thing could write something similar to James Simmons, "Make Your Own Sugar Activities," about how to convert a Sugar Activity to run on Android, then other programmers could get involved in working on them... both individually and in groups.
I'll bet we could interest LUG (Linux Users Groups) members from all over the country and maybe the world to take on projects as a club endeavor where they would "Adopt" an Activity and Adapt it to Andorid. Call it the "4A Project" or the "A/AA4A" (Adopting/Adapting Activities For Android). I personally have contacts with 2 such groups I think would enjoy participating.
Just some thoughts... FWIW
Caryl
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:56:05 -0400
From: holt at laptop.org
To: support-gang at laptop.org
Subject: [support-gang] Fwd: Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar future (was Re: Re: [DESIGN] Single instance activities)
Stark choice facing us? All worth considering-
Subject:
Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar future (was Re: Re: [DESIGN]
Single instance activities)
Date:
Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:52:39 +0200
From:
Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com>
To:
Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com>
CC:
iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>, Tony Forster
<forster at ozonline.com.au>,
"sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org"
<sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>, Manuel Qui�ones
<manuq at laptop.org>
Daniel - thanks for that
cc'ing the IAEP list, since the topic of the future of Sugar is
I believe of general interest to developer and non-developer
contributors alike.
Porting Sugar to Android was identified at the beginning of
the year by the Oversight Board as a strategic goal for Sugar
Labs. There are several good reasons for this. One is that
sales of the classic PC platform - a computer with a keyboard
and mouse, 98% of which run a version of Microsoft Windows,
and most of which are theoretically capable of running a
GNU/Linux distribution - are in freefall (IDC reported last
week -14% PC shipments, the single worst quarterly decline
since PC industry tracking began). Another reason is that
sales of handheld touch devices, the majority of which run a
version of Android, are booming. These situations are of
course related. The education market is a reflection of the
wider market. As for emerging markets, recent estimates from
IDC predict emerging market tablet sales will rise +60% in
2013, smartphones +35%, laptops +4% and desktops off -4%. The
ITU currently estimates 934 million active mobile-broadband
subscriptions for 2013 in developing countries; in Africa,
there are 10 for every 100 inhabitants. The overwhelming
majority of these are running Android (Apple iOS is marginal
in emerging markets). It's not unreasonable to suppose that
educational software for Android could easily be made
available to 25 million children in developing countries.
The initial work seems very encouraging, yet it seems Sugar
Labs doesn't currently have the resources to make an Android
offer available anytime soon. But: now is the time. I believe
fundraising is vital to achieve this goal, at the very least
to facilitate face to face Sugar Camps for the community. I
have ideas how to go about this, but I agree the community
needs to be clear about where we are going. An Android offer
would of course be of great interest to OLPC.
There are also initiatives we could take to multiply the
size of the community. In particular, support for the
Raspberry Pi (which has topped 1 million units in sales - half
of these since September -, is shipped without an OS, and is
arriving in junior high and high school computer science
classes) could be an ideal "OEM" platform for Sugar.
Sean
Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator
On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 10:58 AM,
Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com>
wrote:
On 12 April 2013 00:17, <forster at ozonline.com.au>
wrote:
Hi
When the XO was first designed it was an open choice
for operating system, desktop and file manager. Some
innovative choices were made to optimise the
experience of new young users. Some I think were
good, some bad.
I think Android is the likely educational future. It
is not an open choice like the XO. We do not control
the OS and are unlikely to be able to control the
desktop, file manager or Activity installation.
I ask, what are the really important features of
Sugar in this situation? Is it just the suite of
Activities? Collaboration? What role do we see for
Sugarlabs looking forward?
IMO taken alone the Sugar features are not worth
much. A suite of activities using a well designed,
consistent UI paradigm, have some more value. If
they all use a powerful collaboration framework,
even more. Etc.
I don't think Android is necessarily the future.
It's really hard to make such predictions. Though,
realistically, I don't see how we could get in a
situation where we can control hardware and OS again
in the foreseeable future. Perhaps the challenge is
to figure out how to make the most important Sugar
features possible in this new context. And while at
it reevaluating some of the original choices.
The HTML activities effort is going in that
direction. I don't know if it's the best possible
approach, but it's a try to address the problem you
are pointing out.
I wish I'd see the community
* Acknowledge that we have a major issue
* Analyze it and try to figure out solutions
* Work on them together
I'm not seeing any of those, if not in a few
individuals, and that worries me. Maybe people don't
care or maybe there is a lack of leadership... I
don't know.
_______________________________________________
Sugar-devel mailing list
Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
_______________________________________________
support-gang mailing list
support-gang at lists.laptop.org
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20130412/d78b2185/attachment-0001.html>
More information about the Sugar-devel
mailing list