[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Madagascar efforts of OLPC-FR, recently reported in English

[Tony Anderson]

Thank God, a post about educational use of Sugar! I was very depressed 
reading the list of proposed GSOC activities. Many of the projects 
relate to Musicblocks, a true educational development but which after 
several years of work is still not available to users on ASLO. 
Meanwhile, no GSOC project has followed up on Caryl Bigenhos 
documentation of the TamTam activities or suggestions on use of the 
music keyboard activity.

Not only is there a proposal to continue the effort to move from GTK to 
GTK3, not there is mention of GTK4! In addition, there is now effort to 
port to Python 3. All of these activities may be necessary to avoid 
bitrot, but do not add any educational benefit to the user.

The items mentioned below could be GSOC projects as well as many 
others.  A GSOC project could offer specific parts lists and 
documentation to support use of the XO microphone per Physics on the XO 
(Guzman Trinidad). A GSOC project could update and expand the work of 
Sdenka Z. Salas-Pilco, 'The XO Laptop in the classroom.'

So often GSOC projects are undertaken by participants with no experience 
with Sugar or the XO. I have attempted to teach programming with Turtle 
Blocks (we need to settle on whether the activity is Turtle Blocks or 
Turtle Art to help avoid confusion among Sugar users). Sadly, the 
learners lost their projects because Turtle Blocks does not save the 
project to the Journal.

  The GSOC project does not address the educational opportunity to 
involve learners in the process - it is intended for the linguistic 
elite. Where better to find linguistic skills in a language than in the 
country where it is spoken. There is a tremendous opportunity to involve 
English learners in providing translations for an activity to the local 
language which gets no traction in the Sugar community.

The Browse activity still lacks developer tools. Fortunately the current 
version provides a way to request any url to be downloaded. In teaching 
html and css, the user can show his page by the file:// protocol but 
there is no easy way to upload a page to the school server so the 
learner can share their page with classmates. The WebKit version in 
Browse does not support flexbox, an essential capability for responsive 
design. This means teaching page layout with tables.

A major educational need is the ability of an XO to broadcast slides to 
the other laptops in a classroom. Projectors are very costly - 
particularly if they are able to show a bright display in a classroom. 
There are at least three activities that attempt to address this 
problem. A GSOC project could take this on with help from the new 
standard collabwrapper.

We continue to direct new members in the community to tasks such as 
bug-fixing rather than toward contributions to the educational project. 
There is more to Sugar than compliance to flake or the demands of Debian 
testing.

Tony



On Wednesday, 21 March, 2018 03:22 AM, James Cameron wrote:
> Thanks!The
>
> The study is available as PDF
> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15391523.2017.1388200?needAccess=true
>
> Consequences for Sugar Labs development priorities are;
>
> - Record activity is critical for home use, relevant to family
>    dynamics; so we must urgently port this to GTK+ 3 in order that it
>    remains available,
>
> - Turtle Art activity was not often understood (page 11, "most (use)
>    limited to a disorganized set of juxtaposed bricks"), so an embedded
>    ramp up or tutorial may be helpful,
>
> - Ruler activity was in lessons; so we must urgently fix whatever is
>    stopping it from working in order that it remains available,
>
> - Record activity needs a mirror mode for hairstyling, (page 12),
>
> - an activity for providing a light source, (page 12, page 14),
>
> - an activity focusing on drill and practice of memory may be of use;
>    something like the spaced repetition of Mnemosyne, Anki or Memrise.
>
> In case anyone needs a shortened URL, the media article is also
> accessible as https://theconversation.com/the-93305
>