[Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest [2016-05-25]

[Tony Anderson]

Incredible that the pocketchip is as close as the industry can come to 
match the XO - not even close.

Tony

On 05/25/2016 03:42 PM, Walter Bender wrote:
> == Sugar Digest ==
>
> 1. Just a quick Marvin Minsky remembrance: Marvin, especially in the 
> days of overhead projectors, would use a bit of theatrics in his 
> talks. He'd walk up to the overhead projector, "accidentally" drop all 
> of his slides on the floor, and then proceed to talk about whatever 
> happened to be on his mind at the moment. Often, part way through his 
> allotted time, he'd bend over, scan the slides, pick on up and say, 
> "this looks interesting", and talk about the theme of the slide. Try 
> doing that with PowerPoint (TM).
>
> 2. John Markoff, former technology writer for the <em>NY Times</em> 
> unearthed a link [1] to a classic paper by Alan Kay on personal 
> computing from 1972, "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages". 
> Well worth the read. Alan was actively interacting with Marvin, 
> Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon at the time.
>
> 3. There was an article in <em>The NewYorker</em> last week [2], "Do 
> we really need to learn to code?" The authors, Gary Marcus and Ernest 
> Davis nicely summarize many of the core challenges in the quest to 
> harness artificial intelligence to automate computer programming, but 
> entirely miss the point of why we need to learn to code. As Cynthia 
> remarked more than 30 years ago, "debugging is the great educational 
> opportunity of the 21st Century." Marcus and Davis do observe that "a 
> good programmer understands, deeply, a problem that needs to be 
> solved, and then creates an architecture for solving a problem that’s 
> never been solved before." The true value of learning to code is that 
> it engages children in the rigors and discipline of problem-solving. 
> For must learners, computation is a "thing to think with", not an end 
> in and of itself.
>
> 4. The coding period of Google Summer of Code has officially begun. 
> Please help us support the efforts of our six interns as they help 
> expand the possibilities of Sugar over the next three months. Details 
> can be found in the wiki [3].
>
> 5. A summary of the 6 May meeting of the Sugar Labs oversight board is 
> also available in the wiki [4]. At that meeting, and in subsequent 
> email discussions, we passed a motion to fund an effort to do the 
> Yoruba internationalization and localization. We also passed a motion 
> to finalize updating the Sugar License from GPLv2 to GPLv3. The agenda 
> of the 3 June meeting is posted [5]. Among the pending motions we will 
> be discussing are a series of motions to restructure the finance 
> manager position; a motion to adopt the 2016 vision for Sugar Labs; a 
> motion regarding allocation of GSoC mentoring stipends; a motion to 
> request a membership donations; and discussion of merits of applying 
> for inclusion in GitHub Education pack. Please join us on 
> irc.freenode.net <http://irc.freenode.net>, #sugar-meeting.
>
> 6. There has been progress along many fronts with the Music Blocks 
> activity. Devin Ulibarri arranged for a meeting with his mentor, Larry 
> Scripts, at the New England Conservatory (NEC) of music. Larry had 
> positive and productive feedback for us and we hope to incorporate 
> Music Blocks in seminar at NEC in the fall. I also had a fun meeting 
> with Eric Rosenbaum and Derek Breen, along with Cynthia. (Eric was 
> part of the team that created the lovely music widgets that appeared 
> on the Google Homepage a few months back and he wrote a music 
> extension to Blockly [6].) Eric introduced me to the sampler code in 
> Tone.js, which I am now using for the drum set. What a difference a 
> decent sampler can make!!! (I am using some of the samples that come 
> bundled with the Tam Tam activity [7].) You can check out all of the 
> latest updates to Music Blocks including a simple drum demo at [8] and 
> read the updated guide at [9]. I think Music Blocks is finally stable 
> enough that we should push on the localization efforts. I will be 
> mining some strings from Tam Tam to make the process a bit less 
> tedious for our translation team.
>
> === In the Community ===
>
> 7. Dave Crossland lead a team of volunteers on a weekend wiki 
> gardening adventure. While there is still more work to be done, we 
> managed to prune lots of stale material and we began migrating stable 
> pages to the static website we maintain on github. Thanks to everyone 
> who volunteered. We'll probably have another go at it in July.
>
> 8. There is a nice article about Sugar on a Stick in the Fedora 
> Insider blog [10].
>
> 9. Devin and I wrote a response to a call for comments by the US 
> Department of Education on the role of education technologies on early 
> childhood STEM education [11]. Our focus was on the potential of 
> Free/Libre Software in education. You can read our response in the 
> wiki [12].
>
> === Tech Talk ===
>
> 10. Thomas Gilliard has documented a mechanism [13] for creating a 
> livemedia-creator remix in Fedora 24. (The previous mechanism [14], 
> which as dependent on livecd-creator, will be phased out soon.)
>
> 11. Sebastian Silva has been experimenting with GTK Broadway [15], a 
> GTK backend to provide support for displaying GTK+ applications in a 
> web browser.
>
> 12. Dave Crossland is exploring PocketChip [16], which he calls "the 
> closest thing to an XO being released this year."
>
> === Sugar Labs ===
>
> 13. Please visit our planet [17].
>
> ----
>
> 1. http://mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html
> 2. 
> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/do-we-really-need-to-learn-to-code
> 3. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2016
> 4. 
> https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2016-05-06
> 5. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Minutes#Agenda_items
> 6. http://ericrosenbaum.github.io/blockly/demos/musicblocks/
> 7. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TamTam
> 8. 
> http://walterbender.github.io/musicblocks/?file=MusicBlocks_drumexample&run=true
> 9. http://walterbender.github.io/musicblocks/guide
> 10. 
> http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Fedora-Based-Sugar-on-a-Stick-Is-One-Sweet-Desktop-83446.html
> 11. 
> http://sites.ed.gov/oese/2016/04/open-discussion-on-the-role-of-education-technologies-in-early-childhood-stem-education/
> 12. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Walter/DOE_Response
> 13. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Fedora_24#livemedia-creator
> 14. 
> https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Build_Your_Own_Remix_with_Fedora#Install_the_necessary_software
> 15. https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html
> 16. http://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip
> 17. http://planet.sugarlabs.org
>
> -walter
>
> -- 
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>
>
>
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