[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 191, Issue 49

[Pandya Krish Manojbhai]

Sugar Next? — Let’s Aim Higher

Hey Sebastian, all,
Thanks for kicking this off, the questions in that video hit hard, especially the bit on tools shaping us. I feel like Sugar has insane untapped potential.
If we really believe Sugar can shape education meaningfully, we can push boundaries. We should start aiming for real academic and technical credibility . I’m talking about publishing at conferences like CHI, AIED, NeurIPS , not just for the sake of clout, but because that’s where ideas get challenged, iterated, and taken seriously. ( Had this idea since I presented and attended ICASSP this past week and I was amazed by how much innovation was there to see and it was challenged; the value and reputation academia provides is unfathomable )
​Measuring learning impact in low-resource environments with actual field studies

  *
And of course, the HCI side: what interfaces make the most sense for kids today.

I've been working on Sugar-AI. Current demo’s here: https://youtu.be/JnRKW-3QRx8
But I personally believe if we take the help of Google's Gemini services ( it's cheap for Google to run this as they have the TPU edge on their infrastructure) we can build great things , some of which are
https://mbassistant.streamlit.app/( musicblocks assistant, it's fed with MB guide so it can help on MB questions, also supports images from MB)
https://sugar-docs-ai.streamlit.app/( agent that can talk from sugar-docs)
Also built Manimator , a tool that takes plain text and turns it into narrated Manim animations using architecture LLMs and TTS models.
Started after a late-night chat with Sumit Shrivastava and an early experiment I did here: Teaching AI to Learn Manim<https://youtu.be/7Z_4oc7p20U?si=3ihxW4j4PAdaHGEZ>.
You can try the live version here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/MostlyK/Manimator(it can summarize research papers for you and make videos , or just make videos about any topic you would like)
Now, if we’re serious about this direction ,Sugar being at the cutting edge , we need to also fix the base. We’re still on GTK3 and X11. That’s not sustainable. Sugar needs to move to GTK4 and Wayland, period. That gets us gesture support, better rendering, modern input handling  and just makes it viable for current hardware.
I’d love to help push on this, but it has to be a shared direction. If we had a “Sugar Next” working group that focused on:

  *
A clean GTK4 + Wayland-first shell
  *
Sugar as a research+AI platform — with papers, docs, benchmarks
  *
Tight classroom feedback loops

About me — I’m Krish, undergrad at IIIT-H, I research at RRC in vision + autonomous systems, but I do a lot of hacking across the stack. I play with do random projects in my spare time, and especially open source. Just want to make things that matter.
And to circle back: the reason I mentioned CHI, AIED, NeurIPS, etc. is because I want us to publish there. We’re doing real, meaningful innovation — Sugar is uniquely positioned to contribute to these conversations. Let’s stop just maintaining history and start making it. I personally am willing to write papers for Sugar under the guidance of Board Members.
Thanks,
Krish


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Today's Topics:

   1. Sugar Next? (Sebastian Silva)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2025 13:12:56 -0500
From: Sebastian Silva <sebastian at fuentelibre.org>
To: Sugar Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>, iaep
        <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>
Subject: [Sugar-devel] Sugar Next?
Message-ID:
        <CABNfu5U+2HVfycXgOsY8HaVARGRicfQPzBaxh4VTf7Uq=aLArQ at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Hola,
I'm echoing on Walter's imperative to keep thinking about where Sugar
should be headed. This is something that is always on the back of my mind
yet I find difficulty in articulating a vision with a plan to get there.

Still, this video I watched today reinforced some of my thoughts with
important questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDCV7p7lwFU

The last bit of it seems to be speaking directly at Sugarlabs:

*I think it's time to tie things back to that central question:*

*How do we want our tools to shape us?*

*What patterns do we want to emulate in order to draw ourselves closer to
our ideal state?*




*We are utterly steeped in the affordances designed by others. Why did they
design them in that way? What were they thinking about? Were they thinking
deeply at all?*


*Or is the design we live with today just the best they could do under a
deadline? Were they just trying to survive as a copy machine company in the
digital age?*

*How does that relate to our goals?to our vision?*


*Our conceptual maps are filled with lines drawn by others.* *Why did they
draw them there?*


I'm cross-posting to Sugar-devel and IAEP for any discussions that may
emerge both technical and educational.
--
Sebastian Silva
(?l / he)
Jardinero de Sistemas
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