[Sugar-devel] Are you using Sugar daily for your own education?

[James Simmons]

Dave,

I don't use Sugar daily now, but a few years ago I did. I was looking for a
good way to read Project Gutenberg etexts and Kindles were going for $399.
That was the year of "Give One, Get One" and for the price of a Kindle I
could get an XO laptop for myself plus another for a child I would never
meet. It sounded like a good deal so I went for it.

The Read Activity in the XO only supported PDF's to begin with, which was a
disappointment. I decided to learn how to program the XO so I could make my
own ebook Activity and ended up making several, including one for plain
text files and two different ones for comic books in .cbz format. I also
made an Activity that made it easy to search for and download ebooks from
the Internet Archive.

Learning how to do this led me to write two manuals for the project: one on
programming Sugar Activities and a second one on finding and creating
ebooks. The first book was translated into Spanish by a team of volunteers,

I used my XO to read ebooks just about every day, I read some really
obscure ones like Edison's Conquest Of Mars by G. P. Serviss,

My manuals got published on Create Space and in the Kindle and Nook Stores,
and learning how to do that led to many other publishing writing and
publishing projects.

I haven't used my XO in a long time. Kindles and tablets got better and
cheaper, and my primary interest in the XO was as an e-reader so it got
left behind. However, it is fair to say that Sugar gave me a good
constructionist education and led to me doing a lot of interesting projects
that I would not have done otherwise. Considering that I am fifty years
older than the target audience for Sugar I'd have to say that's pretty good.

James Simmons

On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 11:46 AM, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> That's a great idea :) I added it to the end of
> https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Vision_proposal_2016
>
> On 30 May 2016 at 06:28, Gonzalo Odiard <godiard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> One of my nephews has been diagnosed with a autism related condition.
>> Even when he does not speak, he connected fast with the simple Sugar
>> interface and activities,
>> and use the text to speech feature.
>> I know this is not our main target, but I think it's interesting to know
>> it.
>>
>> Gonzalo
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Laura Vargas <laura at somosazucar.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> 2016-05-30 10:56 GMT+08:00 Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com>:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 29 May 2016 at 19:10, Laura Vargas <laura at somosazucar.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I believe Sugar is a powerful tool for other homeschoolers as well.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I agree, I think the unschooling home/parent market has high
>>>> product/market-fit potential :)
>>>>
>>>
>>> I agree, and it is a growing market. Check the infographic, although
>>> they are just US numbers, a significant 98,3% of homeshooled students use a
>>> computer at home.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Laura V.
>>> I&D SomosAZUCAR.Org
>>> IRC kaametza
>>>
>>> Happy Learning!
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> [image: photo]
>> *Gonzalo Odiard*
>> Lider de proyecto
>> tel.: 4210-7748 | www.trinom.io    Av Calchaqui 4936· 2do Piso. Quilmes
>> <http://www.facebook.com/trinomiosrl>
>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/trinom-io>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Cheers
> Dave
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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