[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2013-10-22
== Sugar Digest == Free software gives the license. Sugar provides the means. 1. I'm back from a week in Paraguay and Uruguay to celebrate Turtle Art Days in Caacupé and Montevideo. Turtle Art Day Caacupé exceeded my expectations. 275 students, their parents, and 77 teachers joined educators and Sugar developers from eight countries throughout the Americas and as far away as Australia (Tony Forster). Brian Silverman and Artemis Papert, the co-creators of Turtle Art, led workshops to a room full entralled children. Martin Abente, Andres Aguirre, and Alan Aguiar similarly led Butiá/Juky robots workshops, using TurtleBots. Claudia Urrea and I led workshops using Turtle Blocks, where the emphasis was on sensors and mutlimedia. Tony led a seminar with teachers on pedagogical framework for Turtle Art. We were assisted by Evolution children, youth leaders in Caacupé who attend school in the morning, teach in the afternoon, and on weekends supply technical support to school programs (I hope we are able to recruit many of them to participate in Google Code In, should Sugar Labs be chosen to participate again this year). While I have come to expect that children will deeply engage with Turtle Art, the fact that they maintained intense focus for three consecutive two-hour workshops, 70 to room, with only short breaks, was unexpected. Many thanks to Mary Gomez, Pacita Pena, Cecilia Alcala, and the Paraguay Educa team for all of the work they did behind the scenes (and in the classrooms) to make the day a success. Turtle Art Day Montevideo was teacher-focused rather than child-focused. Organized by José Miguel García, it attracted 70 teachers to ANEP for a series of workshops. Claudia and I began the day with a short lecture on pedagogy. The workshop themes included sensors (led by Guzman Trindad), robots (led by Andres and the Butiá team), advanced blocks, and turtle mathematics. During the robots workshop, we implemented inter-robot communication by taking advantage of some new collaboration blocks in Turtle Blocks (ported to TurtleBots): we mapped the accelerometer from one machine to the motors of another to make a remote-control steering wheel. In discussions the following day with Mariana Herrera, who works with children with severe physical disabilities, we came up with a simple adaptation that may enable her students to program Butiá using some buttons embedded in pillows. Sdenka Zobeida Salas Pilco and the children at an Aymara-speaking school organized a Turtle Art Day in Puno as well: Children and I organized quickly this event, they provided some ideas for celebrating, it was their idea to arrange the classroom and sticking balloons to the walls. Girls asked me to were the traditional local clothes. They helped me a lot. Also, they prepared a song, a poetry and riddles in Spanish and Aymara language. Finally, the little ones worked some codes, 4th graders were exploring the activity, and 6th graders organized the event. Other Turtle Art Days are following: in Costa Rica, Malaysia, and possibly Singapore. While the primary purpose of these Turtle Art Days is to promote children learning through programming, an important secondary goal was also achieved: programming is not just in service of geometry (what Papert called Mathland) but also in service of whatever passion drives the child. (Artemis refers to the work she and Brian do as Artland. Work with sensors, robots, multimedia, etc., offer many mountains to climb.) 2. Other activities in Paraguay and Uruguay this week included EduJam in Asuncion, a Sugar Hackfest, a meeting with Pablo Flores and the Python Jóven, a Butiá workshop, and a Ceibal event for educators in Montevideo. Leticia Romero organized the first EduJam to be held regionally, at the National University of Asuncion. (I handed out 100 copies of Sugar on a Stick to interested attendees thanks to the generosity of Nexcopy [1].) It was well attended by educators and engineers from Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, et al. The hackfest was also well attended. It included testing of Sugar 100 in a session orchestrated by Gonzalo Odiard (a number of bugs were discovered and fixed), an introduction to the new HTML5/Javascript by Manuel Quiñones, and a discussion of a proposal Brian to use an embedded Logo environment in the Arduino brains of the various robots programmed with TurtleBots. The Butiá workshop was an opportunity for me to observe how children use TurtleBots in programming their robots -- a few of my observations led to some fine-tuning of the UI in TurtleBlocks-192. And a chance to get direct feedback from teachers who use Turtle Blocks in a wide range of activities. Eye-opening. We discussed the ongoing challenge of providing both a low floor and a high ceiling. The Ceibal event was also an opportunity to observe how teachers use Sugar. There were perhaps 100 booths set up with teachers showing their projects. What was most impressive to me was that these projects were
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2013-10-22
On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.comwrote: (c) We need to hold an election for four positions on the oversight board. Claudia, Daniel, and Gonzalo are continuing. The terms for Adam, Gerald, Chris and I are all expiring. Details to be posted shortly. Small Correction: my term is continuing and 3 positions are up for election. See the 4 results from Dec 28th 2013: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-December/015988.html http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_7fe0e83eba6b35ff http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/2012-2013-candidates -- Unsung Heroes of OLPC, interviewed live @ http://unleashkids.org ! ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] your help needed
We have less than one week to pull together our preliminary list of mentors and tasks for our Google Code In application. Please see [1] if you are interested in being a mentor (many tasks do not involve coding, so non-programmers most welcome too). Also, please add possible tasks to the table here [2] (or just add them in plain text after the table, if it is easier. we can edit later) thanks. -walter [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2013/Participate#Mentors [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2013#Tasks -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] your help needed
Sounds good! Count with me as a mentor :) On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.comwrote: We have less than one week to pull together our preliminary list of mentors and tasks for our Google Code In application. Please see [1] if you are interested in being a mentor (many tasks do not involve coding, so non-programmers most welcome too). Also, please add possible tasks to the table here [2] (or just add them in plain text after the table, if it is easier. we can edit later) thanks. -walter [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2013/Participate#Mentors [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2013#Tasks -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2013-10-22
Walter, This is very inspiring work. Thank you. Gerald On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.comwrote: == Sugar Digest == Free software gives the license. Sugar provides the means. 1. I'm back from a week in Paraguay and Uruguay to celebrate Turtle Art Days in Caacupé and Montevideo. Turtle Art Day Caacupé exceeded my expectations. 275 students, their parents, and 77 teachers joined educators and Sugar developers from eight countries throughout the Americas and as far away as Australia (Tony Forster). Brian Silverman and Artemis Papert, the co-creators of Turtle Art, led workshops to a room full entralled children. Martin Abente, Andres Aguirre, and Alan Aguiar similarly led Butiá/Juky robots workshops, using TurtleBots. Claudia Urrea and I led workshops using Turtle Blocks, where the emphasis was on sensors and mutlimedia. Tony led a seminar with teachers on pedagogical framework for Turtle Art. We were assisted by Evolution children, youth leaders in Caacupé who attend school in the morning, teach in the afternoon, and on weekends supply technical support to school programs (I hope we are able to recruit many of them to participate in Google Code In, should Sugar Labs be chosen to participate again this year). While I have come to expect that children will deeply engage with Turtle Art, the fact that they maintained intense focus for three consecutive two-hour workshops, 70 to room, with only short breaks, was unexpected. Many thanks to Mary Gomez, Pacita Pena, Cecilia Alcala, and the Paraguay Educa team for all of the work they did behind the scenes (and in the classrooms) to make the day a success. Turtle Art Day Montevideo was teacher-focused rather than child-focused. Organized by José Miguel García, it attracted 70 teachers to ANEP for a series of workshops. Claudia and I began the day with a short lecture on pedagogy. The workshop themes included sensors (led by Guzman Trindad), robots (led by Andres and the Butiá team), advanced blocks, and turtle mathematics. During the robots workshop, we implemented inter-robot communication by taking advantage of some new collaboration blocks in Turtle Blocks (ported to TurtleBots): we mapped the accelerometer from one machine to the motors of another to make a remote-control steering wheel. In discussions the following day with Mariana Herrera, who works with children with severe physical disabilities, we came up with a simple adaptation that may enable her students to program Butiá using some buttons embedded in pillows. Sdenka Zobeida Salas Pilco and the children at an Aymara-speaking school organized a Turtle Art Day in Puno as well: Children and I organized quickly this event, they provided some ideas for celebrating, it was their idea to arrange the classroom and sticking balloons to the walls. Girls asked me to were the traditional local clothes. They helped me a lot. Also, they prepared a song, a poetry and riddles in Spanish and Aymara language. Finally, the little ones worked some codes, 4th graders were exploring the activity, and 6th graders organized the event. Other Turtle Art Days are following: in Costa Rica, Malaysia, and possibly Singapore. While the primary purpose of these Turtle Art Days is to promote children learning through programming, an important secondary goal was also achieved: programming is not just in service of geometry (what Papert called Mathland) but also in service of whatever passion drives the child. (Artemis refers to the work she and Brian do as Artland. Work with sensors, robots, multimedia, etc., offer many mountains to climb.) 2. Other activities in Paraguay and Uruguay this week included EduJam in Asuncion, a Sugar Hackfest, a meeting with Pablo Flores and the Python Jóven, a Butiá workshop, and a Ceibal event for educators in Montevideo. Leticia Romero organized the first EduJam to be held regionally, at the National University of Asuncion. (I handed out 100 copies of Sugar on a Stick to interested attendees thanks to the generosity of Nexcopy [1].) It was well attended by educators and engineers from Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, et al. The hackfest was also well attended. It included testing of Sugar 100 in a session orchestrated by Gonzalo Odiard (a number of bugs were discovered and fixed), an introduction to the new HTML5/Javascript by Manuel Quiñones, and a discussion of a proposal Brian to use an embedded Logo environment in the Arduino brains of the various robots programmed with TurtleBots. The Butiá workshop was an opportunity for me to observe how children use TurtleBots in programming their robots -- a few of my observations led to some fine-tuning of the UI in TurtleBlocks-192. And a chance to get direct feedback from teachers who use Turtle Blocks in a wide range of activities. Eye-opening. We discussed the ongoing challenge of providing both a low floor and a high ceiling.
