Planet Sugar

Oracle, a sponsor of OLPC Australia, have posted some video interviews of a child and a teacher involved in the One Education programme.

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Sugar Digest

1. Google Code-In begins tomorrow. It is not too late to sign up as a mentor and to recruit students to participate. While many of the tasks involve programming, there are also documentation, design, and research tasks. This is a great opportunity for Sugar Labs to recruit its next generation of developers.

2. Sugar Labs is holding its annual election to the oversight board early next month. If you are interested in running for one of the open board seats, open to any community member, please feel free to contact me or the membership committee with any questions before 7 December.

Tech Talk

3. Daniel Narvaez has made a number of improvements to sugar-build, which has by-and-large replaced sugar-jhbuild as the preferred development environment for Fedora and Ubuntu.

Sugar Labs

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

 

• Packaged and tested Geode all-black composite fix
• 13.1.0 build 14 release and testing
• Work in progress: XO-1.75 UHS-I SD card support, Maliit automatic language configuration.

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Sugar Digest

1. Sugar Labs has been selected as one of ten projects to participate in Google Code In. We join, among others, our colleagues at Fedora et al., in soliciting the participation of high-school (and in our case, middle-school) students to work on projects during a six-week sprint beginning on November 26. This is a great chance for the youth who have been so instrumental in our growth over the past year to show off their talents to the world (and two of them will hopefully win a trip to visit Google). Please help Chris Leonard and me finalize the project and mentor lists over the next few days. (We are offering coding projects, documentation and training projects, outreach, quality assurance, and user interface, so even if you are not a developer, you likely have some skills to devote to the Code In.

NOTE TO MENTORS: Please create an account and fill out the Request to be a Mentor form.

NOTE TO COMMUNITY: Please add to our task lists and please recruit participants.

2. I am in transit back to Boston from a three-day trip to Chihuahua, Mexico. I gave a lecture on Sugar at Campuslink 2.0, the annual tech conference at UACH. I had a lot of fun with the faculty and students and even managed to squeeze in a short tutorial on hacking Sugar on my way to the airport this morning. I am looking forward to growing participation in the Sugar community. (Note to CJL: they are very interested in providing Rarámuri language support for Sugar.)

3. Sugar Labs is holding its annual election to the oversight board early next month. In anticipation of the election, I urge you to sign up for membership in the Sugar community. You need not be a software developer to join: contributions come in many forms, including: teaching, documenting, promoting, supporting, etc. (Note: there is no membership fee.) So, if you are not already a member, please sign up before 23 November.

“If you’re wondering whether you meet the requirements, if you’re a teacher using Sugar in your classroom, regularly reading mailing lists, or have discussed Sugar in IRC, you probably do.”

If you are interested in running for one of the open board seats, open to any community member, please feel free to contact me or the membership committee with any questions before 7 December.

4. Irma Alvarez has completed Fructose (and Dextrose) translations of Sugar into Quechua. Next up: the Honey strings.

In the community

5. The python-joven (Python youth) community has been busy. A number of Sugar and GNOME-related workshops were given last week:

• Introduction to Gtk 3 (Ignacio Rodriguez and Flavio Danesse)
• Game Development on glucose (Ezequiel Pereira)
• My text editor for GNOME (on gtk 2) (Cristian Garcia)
• Sugar (Agustín Zubiaga and Cristhofer Travieso)
• Playing with python on my phone (Agustín Zubiaga and Cristhofer Travieso)
• A media player on Gstreamer 1.0 (Flavio Danesse)
• A Client Server program (Flavio Danesse)

6. Worth a read: a blog from a new Sugar community member.

Tech Talk

7. The latest Butia project by Nicolas Furquez and Rafael Sisto is pretty cool:.

Sugar Labs

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

• XO-4 C1 bringup support.
• Fixed slow GNOME logout regression.
• Set up replacement mock.laptop.org server, solving lack of disk space.
• Fixed XO-4 instruction execution bug exposed by yum.
• Fixed gzip –rsyncable functionality for Etoys.
• Fixed XO-4 occasional failure to resize root partition.

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article in its Nov. 2 “Diversity in Academe” issue about recruiting women to Computer Science.  A few schools are commended for having made their curricula more accessible, by downplaying code and emphasizing “‘computational interactions’ with images, sounds, or biological data.” Rane Johnson-Stempson from Microsoft says that the problems is “everybody is doing their own thing, and no one is connecting”.  The article says Microsoft is giving out grants ($10k to $35K) to make connections.

 

I hope my friends at the Microsoft Campus in Fargo read this because Sugar Labs @NDSU (that’s us) are trying to “Build a smarter computing culture” and we are trying to do it through our after school program, which we want to connect to the 4H Tech Wizards and Bison Best Robotics and the NSF “Broadening Participation” grants, and really, anybody else who will connect with us.  We have swallowed the pill of “computational thinking” or what is called “proceduracy” in English studies (not necessarily the same thing), but we see that standard K-12 schools don’t have much room for re-imagining their curriculum, and that underrepresented minorities (largely from refugee families in Fargo) and girls are not tapping into the unofficial curriculum (Scratch, Alice, app development) available through online sites and tutorials.

 

Bottom line: this article tells us that the demographics of CS isn’t changing very fast, but a few key changes are showing positive results in a few places.  Developing curricula that engage girls and women is clearly THE first and most important step.

 

Related articles

 

• Hopper Event: Encouraging Women in CS (research.microsoft.com)

 

Walter and others have worked hard on porting Sugar and its Activities to GTK3. This port comes along with a bunch of goodies including newest Webkit. This means we can further integrate Sugar with the Web. After wresting a bit with Webkit I finally got a simple Facebook plugin for Turtle Art going. For now, it only works from GNOME but we’ll get it properly integrated with Sugar soon. The way it works is by using a Webkit WebView to get you tu authorize Turtle Art to post into your Wall on your behalf. More thought is needed for other details pertaining managing credentials in Sugar. Maybe we could bring GOA to Sugar?

The code is here.

En el capítulo dedicado a "Accesible Tecnology", la tercera parte muestra el uso de las XO en Ntugi, Kenya.
El deployment es obra de un grupo canadiense de voluntarios y se puede leer una interesante resseña de su trabajo aqui.
Para ver el video, seguir este link y seleccionar la tercera parte.

OLPC Community Summit took place in SF in October 19-21. Read Nancie’s blog post about it:

This is the third year of the Summit. OLPC-SF wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_SF_2012#Photos  OLPC San Francisco, a volunteer group, dreamed up, planned and sponsored this event, partnering with San Francisco State University which generously hosted our event. The work of Professor Sameer Verma of the SFSU Business School enables the continued sponsorship of this event by SFSU and its student volunteers. Together with members of OLPC-SF, they ran a top-notch event.

The conference began on Friday evening with a meet and greet. Saturday and Sunday there were full days of sessions presented in one of three tracks, Education, Outreach and Technology, and included presentations from OLPC Boston and Miami folks also.

A highlight was on Sunday when we heard about the latest stories and data from “The Reading Project.” This is the famous recent “helicopter tablet drop” project in Ethiopia. Nicholas Negroponte still posits that children can figure everything out and learn how to learn without teachers. His plan to drop tablets into a community without prior exposure to any technology, and without instruction on how to use them, to see whether the kids in an illiterate village can learn to read on their own is a bold one. For its experiment, OLPC chose the Motorola Xoom Android Tablet (a touch screen) and loaded it with apps, both free and proprietary. 20 kids each in 2 remote Ethiopian villages received Xoom Tablets. One of the interesting things  about this project is that the tablets have an SD data card included and the “sneakernet” team of 2 visits the sites once a week to swap out the data cards. The cards are Fed Ex’d to the Cambridge office team for analysis. How much arer the tablets being used? Constantly. What are the children doing with them? Are they learning to read upside down or right side up? We had a fascinating glimpse and we await the rest of the story as it plays out.

I have a better understanding of how a school server can be designed and installed, and how content can be customized for installation on multiple XOs, very useful in larger projects and in projects localized in languages other than English. We heard about things that work well on all fronts, and we thoughtfully discuss obstacles and problem solving. Always in the forefront is discussion of the future of OLPC, the future of olpc, e.g., the role of the global grassroots volunteer community, and the mission to provide access to education to the millions of children worldwide who are still without any schools, teachers or formal learning means. With very few exceptions, this incredible global and usually online community works tirelessly without pay and we each pay our own expenses for equipment to improve the XO as a learning tool, and for travel to meetings and for our site work.

On Monday the Sugar Hacking Sprint began and continued through Wednesday. The list of topics to be addressed was ambitious and I am anxious to see the products of the continued volunteer efforts this week.  As always, the story is in the photos! Huge thanks to Sameer, June and Alex and family, SFSU, and the members of OLPC-SF for all of your hard work and for the wonderful OLPC-SF Summit 2012!”

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Quiero compartir una muy buena noticia, la traducción al español del libro “Turtle Confusion” de Barry Newell. Este libro plantea en el diálogo entre una tortuga y un docente, una colección de problemas a resolver, pero tambien comentarios acerca de como plantear estos problemas para que sean de utilidad a los alumnos. La versión original fué puesta por el autor bajo dominio público y autorizó su traduccion, que fué hecha por Melina Lucía Coronel y revisada y editada por Manuel Kaufmann, la imagen de la tapa es de Manuel Quiñones.
Esto no termina aqui, alentado por la repercusión, Barry ha decidido escribir una guia para docentes, con pistas acerca de los acertijos que en forma de poemas se incluyen en cada capítulo. Además Melina ya ha comenzado la traducción de otro libre del mismo autor: "Turtles Speak Mathematics".
Es interesante mencionar que Barry Newell es astrónomo y docente y vive en Australia, y Melina Lucía Coronel es Profesora de Inglés, y vive en Entre Ríos, Argentina, por lo que se trata de una colaboración intercontinental.... La magia de internet. También es interesante ver el desarrollo del proyecto, ya que se llevó a cabo completamente en github.
Pueden leer el libro on line o descargarlo, y también usar la actividad TurtleConfusion en Sugar


Me gusta mucho uno de los comentarios del autor acerca de como usar el cuadernillo:
"Se intenta que el material en éste cuadernillo sea de alguna manera confuso a primera vista. En la vida real, no podemos evitar sentirnos confundidos de vez en cuando. Éste sentimiento de confusión nos indica que nuestro entendimiento de una situación en particular es inadecuada... En otras palabras, la confusión representa una oportunidad para aprender.
Los adultos deberían reconocer el peligro que existe en proteger a los jóvenes de los sentimientos de confusión. La vida no nos ofrece sus problemas en una secuencia de paquetitos cuidadosamente graduada, cada una de los cuales se puede resolver por el ‘alumno promedio’ en una hora de clase. Se lo debemos a nuestros alumnos, a la posibilidad de sentirse confundidos a veces; a permitirles aprender de lidiar con, y hasta beneficiarse de, la confusión; a permitirles desarrollar respuestas, en lugar de entrar en pánico, frente a situaciones en las que pueden sentirse inicialmente sobrepasados."

An unruly tag team of OLPC folks gave a long talk on the Literacy Project today for attendees at this year's OLPC-SF Community Summit. It was streamed live on Ustream: Part 1 (Matt Keller, Richard Smith), Part 2 (Richard Smith, Ed McNierney, C. Scott Ananian, Chris Ball, questions from the audience). We've posted the slides: Matt Keller, Richard Smith, C. Scott Ananian.

You can try out some of the apps mentioned in the talk. Nell's Balloons and Nell's Colors will run in any reasonably-recent Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browser. They will also run as a Firefox webapp on Android devices, using the latest Firefox nightly for Android. For deployment we use a slightly-tweaked build of Firefox (adding expanded webapp storage quotas and the ability to use plugins from inside webapps), and a custom plugin to hook up the Funf logging framework. Source code is available on github: nell-balloons; nell-colors. In addition, Chris Ball's "Matching" app for Android is available: apk; source.

I just now replied to this message from the Black Data Processing Africa mailing list. How much of this did you know about?

to BDPA-Africa
On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 2:14 PM, chifu_wa_malindi <chifu2222@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ada Lovelace Day: Celebrating Women’s Genius
> Posted 16 October 2012 17:59 GMT
> Written by Renata Avila
>
> I want to challenge you. Yes, you, who are reading this article: mention five, just five names, of amazing women in science and technology you know, from five different countries in the world. The average person will likely fail to complete the challenge.

What, only five? I admit that I have an advantage in this area. I have
studied the question over the years, even before I got involved in
global education for all children in the One Laptop Per Child program.
We have a great emphasis on equal opportunity for girls and women
everywhere, including the end of poverty and oppression for all.

> Many will just mention some names they heard in recent news, like Marisa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo.

Not only CEO, but a mathematician and Computer Scientist specializing
in applications of AI to search, and Google employee #20.

• Theano, early Pythagorean mathematician, wife of Pythagoras, Greek colony in Italy
• Hypatia, Librarian of Alexandria, scientist, mathematician, philosopher, Egypt
• Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, science writer, Germany
• Émilie du Châtelet, mathematical physicist and Voltaire’s mistress, France
• Marie Sklodowska Curie, double Nobel Prize winner (physics and chemistry), Poland
• Hedy Lamarr, actress with an important wireless patent, Austria
• Of course Ada Augusta Byron, Countess of Lovelace, UK
• Captain (retired as Rear Admiral) Grace Murray Hopper, computer pioneer, US

If we can argue that medieval Germany is not the same country as
unified modern Germany, then we can add one of the greatest women in
mathematics and physics, Emmy Noether.

OK, that was nine countries, depending on how you distinguish
countries, off the top of my head.

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_scientists

from which we add

• Aglaonike, astronomer, Greece
• Dorotea Bucca, physician, Italy
• Eva Ekeblad, agronomist and chemist, Sweden
• Maria Sibylla Merian, biologist, The Netherlands
• Sofia Kovalevskaya, mathematician, Russia
• Inge Lehmann, seismologist, Denmark
• Amanda Barnard, physicist, Australia
• Ada E. Yonath, crystallographer, Israel

Somebody should add all the names below to this list. It is a pleasure
to see that we are making such progress, and a great shame that we are
not making more. In particular, that Malala Yousafzai was shot by
Taliban extremists in Pakistan for the crime of promoting education
for girls, and remains in critical condition.

> Ada Lovelace Day, celebrated every October 16, honor international women who are contributing with effort and little praise in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths – women whose skills are urgently needed for the future of the world.
>
> Here we highlight some of these extraordinary women from all over the world.
>
> For example:

• Brazilian molecular biologist and geneticist Mayana Zatz is heading the University of São Paulo’s (USP) Human Genome Research Centre
• Mexican Environmental Engineer Blanca Jiménez Cisneros is the Director of the Division of Water Sciences and Secretary of the International Hydrological Program from UNESCO
• Sijue Wu, from China, was awarded with the Morningside Medal, considered the most prestigious award for Chinese experts in Mathematics. Wu is also the first female recipient in the medal’s history.

> ‘Introduce a girl to engineering’ by Argonne Library
>
> `Introduce a girl to engineering’ by Argonne Library (CC-BY-NC-SA)
>
> Leading the list of women scientists is

 

• Fabiola Gianotti who is directing the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, considered the world’s biggest scientific experiment. Gianotti is followed by Sunita Williams, an Astronaut who holds the record for the longest space flight by a woman.
• Meanwhile, Jennifer Seberry is well known as The Grandmother of cryptography and computer security in Australia. She is a globally recognized cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist who took part in the discovery of the foundations of what is computer security today.

> All the women listed above are at the peak of their consolidated careers. They are role models and examples who are inspiring many girls around the world. A new generation of scientists, computer experts, and researchers are taking the first steps to lead science and technology all over the world.

• In Cuba Martha Zoe, a specialist in natural medicine in Cuba using native herbs growing in the island, discovered how `anamu’ pills help those who are sick with terminal diseases.
• In Tunisia, Sarrah Ben M’Barek is engaged in similar research, discovering innovative uses of plants. She also advocates to teach children how fascinating science can b