Awesome to witness the 6th birthday of Sugar Labs :) Congratulations and best wishes :) Many more to come :)
Regards, Manu On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 11:07 PM, Walter Bender <[email protected]>wrote: > ==Sugar Digest== > > Happy 6th Birthday Sugar Labs > > 1. I just got back from Turtle Art Day in Kathmandu, Nepal. OLE Nepal > helped organize a 2-day workshop with 70+ children from four schools. Many > thanks to Martin Dluhos, Basanta Shrestha, Subir Pradhanang, Rabi > Karmacharya, Bernie Innocenti, and Adam Holt, all of who contributed to the > event. > > It was not a surprise that children in Nepal are like children everywhere > else: they take to programming like ducks to water. We began by taking the > children in small groups to learn some basics about controlling the turtle: > one child plays the role of turtle, one holds the pen (a piece of chalk) > and the rest, in a circle, instruct the "turtle" how to draw a square. They > need to be very precise with their instructions: if they just say "forward" > without saying how far forward, the turtle keeps walking. If they say > "right", without saying how far to turn, the turtle keeps spinning after > they draw a square, I ask them to draw a triangle then they are ready to > start with Turtle Art. I've posted a few of the chalk drawing in the wiki: > simple ones [1] from my session to more elaborate [2] from those working > with another one of the mentors. > > After working with chalk, we went to the computers. On a laptop connected > to a projector, I introduced Turtle Blocks, and again ask for a square. I > show them that they can snap together blocks, e.g., forward 100, right 90; > showed them the repeat block; and then I show them how to use the start > block to run their program with the rabbit or snail (fast or slow). Over > time, I introduced the pen and let them explore colors for awhile. Next, I > introduce action blocks: make an action for drawing a square and then call > that action inside of a repeat block followed by right 45 and you get a > pretty cool pattern. This was followed by more open-ended exploration. I > introduced a few more ideas, such as using "set color to heading" (the > color is determined by the direction the turtle is heading); "set color = > color + 1" to increment the color; and "set color = time" to make the color > slowly change over time. I also introduced a few other blocks, such as > show, speak, and random. Finally, I introduced boxes. For this, I use a > physical box: I ask the children to put a number (written on paper) in the > box; then I ask them what number is in the box. I ask them to take the > number in the box and add 1 to it. Again I ask them what number is in the > box. I repeat this until they get used to it; then I show them the same > thing using Turtle. The example program I write with them is to go forward > by the amount in the box, turn right, and add 10 to the number in the box. > I asked them what they think will happen and then show them that it makes a > spiral. When they run it with the "snail", they can see the number in the > box as the program runs. Another block I explicitly introduced was the > "show" block. We programmed an animation with "show image", "wait 1", "show > image", "wait 1", ... They recorded dance steps using the Sugar Record > activity and used those images in their Turtle projects. As often as > possible, we tried to have a child show their work to the entire group. At > the end of the second day, we had a table set up for an exhibition; we had > to keep adding more tables as more and more children wanted to show off > their projects. > > We originally planned on break-out sessions on Day Two, but we had a > technical glitch on Day One, that slowed things down quite a bit. The > children were running Sugar 0.82 on XO 1 laptops, which is nearly six-years > old. They had them connected to the mesh network, which cannot scale > properly to 70+ machines. The result was a lot of frozen machines. It took > most of the day to figure out what was wrong. Once we turned off the > radios, everything worked great. I also had to spin a stripped down version > of Turtle Art, since a number of dependencies I use, such as some Python > 2.7 features, were unavailable on 0.82. > > We did have one break-out session for robotics. I brought a Butia to Nepal > and I wrote the typical program with the kids to have the Butia go forward > until it got to the edge of the circle (everyone was sitting in a circle on > the floor); whomever the Butia approached had to push a button so that the > Butia would spin and then go in another direction. We then added a few > embellishments: the Butia would say "ouch" or "that tickles" when the > button was pushed; and we had it take a picture of the child who pushed the > button. We saved the files so we could use them to make an animation in > Turtle Art. > > Of note: One child approached me to say he is teaching himself to program > Python. I showed him how to export Python from his Turtle Art projects. > I'll be curious how he uses that feature. I am making a new set to "Turtle > Cards" [3] to demonstrate the steps we took in explaining Turtle to the > children. > > 2. While I was in Kathmandu, I had a chance to meet with the Nepali FOSS > community, thanks to Shankar Pokharel, Ankur Sharma, and Subir Pradhanang. > We had a nice talk about the challenges and opportunities facing FOSS in > Nepal. > > 3. Just before my trip to Nepal, I was in Mexico attending Aldea Digital > [4]. The central plaza in Centro Historico in DF is turned into the world's > larget free Internet cafe for two weeks. I gave a lecture about Sugar and > ran an impromptu Turtle Art session. (We installed Sugar in a VM on twenty > Windows 8 machines and ran a session.) I also had a chance to meet Ian, the > 9-month old baby of Carla Gomez: a future Turtle Artist. > > === In the Community === > > 4. Mike Dawson, formally of OLPC Afghanistan, wrote a nice commentary on > the Keepod [5] in which he mentions Sugar on a Stick. > > 5. Google Summer of Code begins on the 19th of May. We'll be meeting every > week in IRC on Fridays at 2PM EST. > > 6. There is still time to enter the Sugar Background Image Contest [6]. > > === Tech Talk === > > 7. Daniel Narvaez has been building F20 images for XO [7]: The XO-1 image > boots into Sugar (latest from git) and wifi works. He has also built XO-4 > images. > > 8. Daniel also built tarballs for 0.101.5 [8, 9]. We are now in string, > API and UI freeze. > > 9. Please help us with testing of Sugar 102. See [10] for details. > > === Sugar Labs === > > 10. Please visit our planet [11]. > > -walter > > ---- > > [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Chalk1.jpg > [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Chalk2.jpg > [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art/Turtle_Cards > [4] http://aldeadigitalmx.com/ > [5] > http://www.ictworks.org/2014/05/14/keepod-wasting-40000-to-reinvent-linux-on-a-stick/ > [6] http://contest.sugarlabs.org > [7] http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~dnarvaez/oob/ > [8] > http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar/sugar-0.101.7.tar.xz > [9] > http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/sugar-toolkit-gtk3-0.101.5.tar.xz > [10] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.102/Testing > [11] http://planet.sugarlabs.org > > -- > Walter Bender > Sugar Labs > http://www.sugarlabs.org > > _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > [email protected] > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep >
_______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
