Re: [IAEP] sugar feedback
Am 10.09.2008 um 11:45 schrieb Simon Schampijer: Bill Kerr wrote: walter wrote in the digest: Any and all feedback is enormously valuable: please speak up A year 10 class at my school in australia is currently evaluating sugar activities using USB keys - various impressions, forum, QA, tasks, lessons etc. are being recorded on this wiki: http://xo-whs.wikispaces.com/ (keep in mind that the collaborative aspects have not worked out of the box and we are still testing the jabber server, not running it routinely in lessons yet - will resume efforts here after the current busy assessment period is over) the school name has been removed from the home page, there are no student photos and kids are using aliases due to education department attitudes - earlier this year an innovative class blog in another school was closed down and investigated by the department Oh i did not have those problems on my list of possible issues. Hmm this is sad - but i guess some people are worried to give out information - did they say the reasoning? Apparently you have not worked with kids yet ... it's the same in Germany :/ - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sad
Am 17.09.2008 um 10:19 schrieb Albert Cahalan: This may require the loss of a few sacred cows. [...] Within the Sugar community, certain activities are adored. They hold privileged positions, generally being installed be default despite not being of a utility (shell, browser) nature. They even get to hide their bloat by being allowed to require RPMs that are of no use to anything else. They are terribly slow. They are terribly complicated. Feel free to name names, and please state why providing those activities is bad for a learning device, and don't hesitate to suggest a (non-Sugar) Linux application as replacement. If you are thinking of the same activity I think you are, then this got nothing to do with Sugar, it runs on other Linuxen as well as on Mac or (gasp) Windows. It was installed and is used in one of the largest Linux-in-schools deployments (before OLPC, not Sugar) because it was deemed useful for learning. Picking that as example why Sugar is bad is bordering on FUD. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sad
Am 17.09.2008 um 10:19 schrieb Albert Cahalan: Microsoft probably deserves to win. :-( [...] It's really offensive to insist that other people (children, the poor, dark-colored people, them foreigners...) be forced to use stuff which you yourself find to be inadequate for your own daily (exclusive) use. By that measure OLPC should ship Windows, which is used daily (exclusively) by 90% of all computer users. A truly amazing opportunity (Linux-only laptops for kids) has been squandered. It's An Education Project - not a Linux-only laptops project. Sugar exists because we think a GNOME desktop is *not* fundamentally better for learning than a Windows desktop (or any existing desktop for that matter). But Sugar is based on GNU/Linux because we think that FOSS is fundamentally better for learning than closed software. And Sugar is largely built in Python because we think that is fundamentally better for learning than C. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] G1G1 (was Re: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-09-29))
Am 06.10.2008 um 06:28 schrieb Nirav Patel: Ah, thanks. Does anyone know the name of the font used in OLPC marketing materials, such as the text on amazon.com/xo ? I'm pretty certain it's these: laptop.org: VAG Rundschrift (a.k.a. VAG Rounded) amazon.com: Arial Rounded (similar but not quite as pure) (fellow typophiles might want to read the VAG Rounded wikipedia entry) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] sugar and the digital age (was Re: notes from the field - Mongolia)
Am 09.10.2008 um 19:10 schrieb elana langer: there is a very common feeling amongst policy makers and teacher that the XO doesn't really prepare students for the field of IT. There was a pilot project done in Mongolia that was run by the Japanese gov't where they introduced Linux to 4 towns. The students went on to study at the Mongolian IT college and apparently failed all their courses. The outcome was that these students were not prepared for real IT. Personally I feel that this is bogus and that it is the notion of IT, education and learning that need to be examined at the university level as well - however - just as I have learned when trying to reform educational methodologies there is a need to meet the norm half way (at least) and work from within - it would be nice if the OS could be designed in a similar gentler manner. Teachers, parents, gov't officials and many others are concerned that the computer doesn't conform to their expectations of a computer. Bear in mind that there was a lot promised in this computer like collaboration and mesh and the crank (everyone asks about the damn crank) that are still in development and all get lumped into the understanding of the OS. Essentially, in the minds of these people, fluency on windows, being able to do power point presentations and surf the web is what being prepared means. - I think if we could make some things a little more straightforward like saving, storing and accessing files (in the way PC users and Mac users can sort their way out in the opposite OS pretty intuitively) it would help bridge the gap to traditional expectations. Well, the XO already goes way more than half-way towards the popular notions of how computers should work. Almost all the software stack is identical to what you find on an arbitrary desktop. Demanding that it should go even more towards what is currently hip in this very immature field of IT doesn't sound too compelling if the goal is to empower future generations to use computers as malleable tools for thought, rather than as enslaving magical devices for office work. I'm glad at least some aspects of the system question the current status quo. Kudos to the Sugar developers for not giving in to the crowd's pseudo-wisdom. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [sugar] Sugar on Edubuntu
On 05.11.2008, at 13:55, David Farning wrote: .One sticking point was the availability of squeak on Ubuntu. If I remember this issue was beaten to death before I got involved with SL. I only remember discussion of getting it into Debian, not Ubuntu. Basically, even though the license issues are finally resolved, they did not want to have it in because they do not agree with its current development model: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-June/015479.html - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar on Ubuntu - Summary
On 06.11.2008, at 16:50, David Farning wrote: Currently, Squeak Etoys is distributed as an image or snapshot rather than source code. This is misleading. Etoys comes with full source code, nothing is held back. While distributing images is the standard work flow for Squeak Etoy developers, they are difficult for down stream developers to work with. This is not true. It is *not* difficult to work with images, it is what every Squeak developer uses. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software
Cutting this important part out of another discussion ... On 10.11.2008, at 20:49, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: Of course, this all supposes the open source model. If someone gets paid to do a Python Etoys or a GNU Smalltalk one then I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a good quality implementation created from scratch in just a couple of months. I have been thinking about this for quite a while - how valid is the assumption that a volunteer community would be able to create software that they do not intend to use themselves? For example, Etoys development was not driven by volunteers, but by a small research group around Alan Kay with paid developers. It is open- source and free, but we get relatively few contributions from volunteer developers. This is in contrast to Squeak, the underlying system, which is supported and advanced by a thriving community of developers. But the majority of the Squeak community is not interested in Etoys, just in the Smalltalk development system (which they use and improve for themselves). I see a similar issue with Sugar - since no-one seems genuinely interested in making it their own environment, but rather developing it for someone else, progress pretty much is made only by the (unfortunately few) paid developers. The few parents / teachers who might want to contribute are not savvy enough to actually do so. Is there an example where volunteer-driven development succeeded that was not of the scratch-your-own-itch kind? If so, what can we learn from them? - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Anyone going to 25C3?
On 24.11.2008, at 03:23, Christoph Derndorfer wrote: Hi all, I briefly wanted to check in to see whether anyone here is planning on attending 25C3 (http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/) in Berlin at the end of December? I'll be there from the 27th to the 29th, I've heard that some people from OLPC France are also planning to attend and it looks as though SJ Klein from OLPC is also going to be there. I was thinking that if enough people show up we could really plan some cool OLPC and Sugar related activities or something. Let me know what you think. I'll be there on the 27th only, and I hear that those from OLPC Germany who can only attend one day will try to come on that date, too. A big get-together on that afternoon would be great. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Proposal: IRC channel and mailing list for support
On 24.11.2008, at 19:38, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote: On Sun, 23 Nov 2008, Luke Faraone wrote: All, In order to facilitate non-developer use, I'd like to propose the addition of the following: * #sugar-users - a channel for non-development how do I use this questions, akin to #olpc-help * a sugar-users mailing list for the same purpose Is this acceptable, or is some discussion needed? A big +1 here. Go, Luke, go! The more typical setup would be #sugar for user questions and #sugar- devel as refuge for developers. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Library Collections are only layered on the Browse Activity.
On 25.11.2008, at 18:02, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:52 PM, C.W. Holeman II [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The diagram for the Sugar Application Stack (http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Application_Stack) shows Library Collections as being layer on top of all of the Activities. The only Activity that I have found to deal with Library Collections is Browse (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Library_grid). So, as it looks to me the graphic should have the Library Collections only on top of the Browse Activity. Agreed, though wonder if some other activities might be interested in accessing that content? Potentially there could be Ebooks for Read, templates for Write, example projects for Etoys etc. How that would actually work is not clear, however. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Proposal: IRC channel and mailing list for support
On 26.11.2008, at 15:13, Seth Woodworth wrote: On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Simon Schampijer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Martin Dengler wrote: On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 07:50:43PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote: On 24.11.2008, at 19:38, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote: On Sun, 23 Nov 2008, Luke Faraone wrote: [yet-another-mailing list proposal] A big +1 here. Go, Luke, go! The more typical setup would be #sugar for user questions and #sugar- devel as refuge for developers. +1. Keep it simple (users don't use sugar-users, they use sugar). - Bert - Martin yup - #sugar for novices and #sugar-devel for the rest of us sounds good to me too :) I'm still not convinced that this is a good idea *yet*. Splitting #sugar and #sugar-devel should only happen after there are too many users asking questions in #sugar. The first rule of the internet is not making a rule until there is a problem. But either way, if you start publishing that #sugar is now help, I'll start hanging out there. I have little experience with IRC, but I found that it's really good for a community to have a special mailing list for beginners, where dumb questions are explicitly welcome. I was rather skeptical a few years ago when it was proposed to have a squeak-beginners list in addition to the squeak-dev list. But it really encouraged newbies to speak up. And it should bear beginners or something similar in its name to make the purpose blatantly obvious. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] chatzilla IRC
On 27.11.2008, at 11:41, Bill Kerr wrote: issues for newbies like me (things which joel / shenki explained to me separately): * it appears that 60 people are in the room but many are not there That's mostly an issue of time zone, and secondly of getting attention. The trick with time zones is matching a world clock against the sleep schedule of certain professions ;) The trick with getting attention is to direct messages at specific persons, like bertf: etoys saving works again, yay!. This is a regular message, everyone can see it, but most IRC clients beep and highlight such a line if the user's nick name is mentioned literally. There is a third part of course, matching nick names to real persons. It's one of my pet peeves that people need to role-play in otherwise serious conversations, but it apparently is one of those odd habits that's not going to fade. One trick with that is /whois nick which might actually report the real name. More reliably, some users list their IRC nick at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:IRC_users HTH, - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] FOSDEM 2009: Brussels 7-8 Feb
On 02.12.2008, at 07:27, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 4:50 PM, Bernie Innocenti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Who's coming? http://www.fosdem.org/ I'm very likely to make it. Would we want to have talks? A booth, even? Only lightning talks are still open. We need to get notifications of conferences at least when the first call for participations go out. True, although conference organizers are usually approachable folks, in particular if you can find a shortcut via mutual friends and have a good pitch ;) So if there was someone willing to staff a booth it might not be too late yet. - Bert - Key dates: * 2008-11-22: Deadline for devroom stand requests * 2008-11-30: Devroom stand acceptance notification * 2008-12-26: Deadline for lightning talk requests * 2008-12-29: Lightning talk acceptance notification * 2009-01-09: Deadline for final devroom lightning talk schedules * 2009-02-07 to 2009-02-08: FOSDEM 2009 ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Common Sugar distribution package contents.
On 03.12.2008, at 18:15, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 08:36:42AM -0800, C.W. Holeman II wrote: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Application_Stack: * Library Collections (e.g., for the Browse Activity) * Sugar Activities (Browse, Read, Write, Record Turtle Art) * Sugar * Operating System (Linux, MacOSX, MSWindows) * Hardware Platform ( XO-1, EEE PC, Classmate, XO-2) Libraries are distributed in collections. Activities are distributed in bundles. Sugar is distributed in various kinds of packaging. The library collections and activity bundle formats for Sugar are in a format that is common across all OS/Hardware platforms. Sugar is distributed in formats that depend upon the OS/Hardware platform. The contents of activity bundle like Turtle Art or Browse is the same across all OS/Hardware platforms. The performance of Sugar on various OS/Hardware platforms varies. This should only be for issues that are dependent upon the underlying hardware and OS. It should not be the case for Sugar, Activities and libraries. There should be a common or core set of Activities and Library Collections that are in every Sugar distribution regardless of the kind of packaging the OS uses. There should be documentation on what the common or core Sugar must always contain. The packagers need this information. There may be additional optional packages also defined that are intended to work on all systems. This is needed to promote Sugar as a friendly environment for outsiders to become insiders. Suggestion: Encourage, but do not mandate, distributions to follow the Glucose/Fructose grouping of packages as documented at http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Source_Code and ecourage (not mandate) releasing one of the following (prioritized - first is best): 1) All branches (0.81, 0.82 and 0.83 currently) 2) All stable branches (0.82 currently) 3) Only latest stable branch (0.82 currently) This is releated to the recent discussion on whether Sugarlabs would rather that Debian-edu) rip out and avoid Sugar from its next release than release with software not matching latest stable branch. Must all parts of Glucose/Fructose be included in a distribution? Must all parts of Glucose/Fructose be installed together? Must all parts of Glucose/Fructose be no older than official release? Must all parts of Glucose/Fructose be no newer than official release? What if a distribution does not obey your wish? Do you want to protect your name like Mozilla does (leading to Debian renaming its web browser to Iceweasel to be allowed to independently apply security patches)? Or do you perhaps want to only protect your own official binary releases like Squeak? s/Squeak/Scratch/ - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Calendar goodness
On 04.12.2008, at 17:08, David Farning wrote: On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 2:09 AM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 5:48 AM, David Farning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Check out the new wiki feature Bernie add to w.s.o. http://sugarlabs.org/go/WikiTeam/Meetings We can now embed gcalendars directly into the wiki:) I added a page for a calendar of conferences of interest to our communities. http://sugarlabs.org/go/Events Edward do you know if it is possible to embede a weekly gcalendar? A weekly calendar would be more useful and take up less space on some of the team pages. I just never figured out how to do it. Oh. There actually is something on that page, if you try Firefox. It's blank in Safari, so I wondered what the fuzz is about ... - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Branding and mascot (Was: Re: Color combos for the logo)
On 05.12.2008, at 13:30, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 1:17 PM, Jameson Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think that Sugarlabs can do better at branding in general. A good branding presence has related logos for the organization and for the product; color swatches, 4 or 5 at a time (not just 2-by-2; including greys, we have at most 3 at a time); a decorative font; and more workaday serif and sans-serif fonts chosen to go well with the decorative font. I'm not saying we need all of this tomorrow, but that should be the direction we're heading. Think, for instance, of the excellent branding of the Obama campaign, which AFAIK was completely available to the grassroots and nevertheless (in a totally content-free regard) kicked the pants off of McCain's more-centralized campaign. Immediate action items: 1. I really think the svg should be up in a public place, as well as (references for) the font (is that the ubuntu font, or other?). 2. We need a logo for sugar, as opposed to sugar labs and OLPC. The XO dude is inevitably going to have associations with OLPC which might turn off other hardware vendors. I guess the obvious option would be the sugar part of the sugarlabs logo. 3. Personally, I'd love a mascot too; kids like cuddly. My initial brainstorms: associated with sugar? Pollinators (nectar) Hummingbirds (too western-hemisphere) Bats (anything nocturnal is culturally dangerous, but I love 'em) Bees (good possibility) flies (yuck) ants (has good community associations) gingerbread man (cute, but a little too gendered and shrek-y) bears (too generic) sugarcane fieldworker (yeah, right) I just googled and OMG WE HAVE A WINNER as far as I am concerned. That is cute beyond words and it is called a sugar glider. I'd never heard of that name even though my mom's Australian but it is beyond my wildest dreams. What do other people think? Looks like we indeed have a winner, yeah ;) It is very cute indeed. I googled a bit and could not find obvious software-related uses as mascot. Other uses include 2004 Commonwealth Youth Games mascot: http://bendigo2004.thecgf.com/About_the_Games/The_Mascot/ Disney fanclub mascot: http://www.magicalmountain.net/shandy-the-sugar-glider/shandy-the-sugar-glider.aspx An Australian environmental association: http://www.oxleycreekcatchment.org.au/our_partners.html AOL Kids cartoon: http://kids.aol.com/KOL/2/CartoonsAndComics/Archive/super-gliders Trivia: the modern German name Kurzkopfgleitbeutler sounds quite funny, although it doesn't mention Sugar anymore, whereas the famous zoologist Alfred Brehm called it Zuckereichhorn: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Zuckereichhorn_brehm.png - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Branding and mascot (Was: Re: Color combos for the logo)
On 05.12.2008, at 20:57, Jameson Quinn wrote: Last try. Smilier, the X is closer to the real animal, and bigger eyes. On IRC they say this one's much cuter. http://sugarlabs.org/go/Image:Suggie_glidie_3.svg Same questions: 0. Is anybody worse than neutral on the idea of a mascot (which would not replace the xo icon or sugar logo)? 1. Do people like the species? 2. Do people like the idea of incorporating the XO logo and the two- color look? 3. If the above two are yes, then what is wrong with this one? Should it be more cartoony - bigger eyes and head, fewer fingers? Is it still too flasher-y? Other suggestions? I like the species and the two colors work okayish. The embedded XO now is almost bearable esthetically. I'd still soften the lower corner (make the right angle round like on the sides). Also the thin orange border seems a bit unnecessary and out of place. And I dont't like the fingers only on one side, but have no good suggestion on how to improve tat. But overall it's adorable :) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Add Fedora logo
On 06.12.2008, at 17:49, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Add Fedora logo to Sugar This is, I think, a misunderstanding. Yes it is. I set reply-to to OLPC-devel, this does not concern Suagr. Kim says Sugar is supposed to include a fedora logo (they will provide), on the home screen and in the boot up text. If you look at the Visibility Guidelines document included in the bug, it contains two images, one of which shows the Fedora logo next to the bootup text, and one of which shows the Fedora logo next to the XO man in the ring. I suspect Kim's statement is based on these two images. I think Kim interpreted this to be the bootup screen and the home screen, but from my reading of the text, both images are meant to refer to the pre-X bootup sequence. One is text-mode boot, and the other is pretty boot. This is consistent with what I've understood from conversations with Greg and others: Fedora's branding will appear only during the boot sequence, which is not part of Glucose at all. In other words: don't worry about it. This has nothing to do with you. I could be wrong, of course, in which case I think we should simply let distributions patch as they please. It seems awfully silly for the Debian packages to be Fedora-branded. You are not wrong. The agreement linked to in the bug report clearly states that the Fedora branding is to be shown *during the boot process. Not after. I have added this to the bug report, but please someone more priviledged change the bug description: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8767 - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Etoys keyboard shortcuts
Some might find this useful: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Etoys_Shortcuts - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick - Can we give it away at FUDCOM and at the DC event Walter is going to?
On 08.12.2008, at 13:32, Simon Schampijer wrote: Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi, I think it would be cool to be able to give everyone SoaS USBs as Conference Swag at events where Sugar Labs is presenting. What do we need to do this? 1. A SoaS image we are proud of. I think we are almost there. 2. Lots of USB Sticks - Walter says he is making good progress on a donor. 3. A way to flash a hundred sticks in only an hour or two - Any ideas? Do other people think this is a useful thing to aim for in January? Sure. I just gave it a test drive. 1. it booted without problems 2. dpi is wrong - text is much too small 3. 800x600 is too small - could not edit the collaboration server in the control panel 4. xrandr works in Terminal to set a larger resolution 5. now can use network control panel 6. to enable new collab server Sugar restarts 7. get a login screen, no auto-login, have to press return 8. due to restart, screen res is back to 800x600, need to resize again 9. I see ppl in neighborhood :) 10. but they are cramped into the upper left 800x600 portion of the screen 12. Browse start page is empty 13. Download TamTamMini activity - downloading works 14. Run TamTamMini - depends on csound library, does not work 15. Download and run Speak activity - depends on numpy, does not work 16. notice a trend here, so install etoys and squeak rpms rpm -Uvh http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/squeak-vm-latest.rpm rpm -Uvh http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-latest.rpm 17. Download and run Etoys activity - works 18. go to squeakland.org in Browse 19. try example there - works unexpectedly (meaning that olpc is still in the agent string) So this points at a general problem with Sugar activity dependencies ... What activities make the best impression and should be on the Stick? Don't know about impressions but if I was asked, Etoys should be on the Stick. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick - Can we give it away at FUDCOM and at the DC event Walter is going to?
On 08.12.2008, at 17:12, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 04:34:36PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote: I just gave it a test drive. Sorry if I am the only one missing important parts of this thread, but _what_ did you test drive? I understand by now that SoaS refers to http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick - are you all playing with the Fedora-based ISO? That's what I did, yes, because all it requires is downloading http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/soas-5.iso and booting it. I can't do a lot of fiddling ;) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Web4dev
I think I have not seen this mentioned here yet - just got sent a reminder of the invitation: The Fifth Annual United Nations’ Web4Dev conference, hosted by UNICEF in 2009, will bring together global thought leaders and innovators from the United Nations, academia, the development and private sectors to focus on the importance of strategic partnerships, innovation and new technology for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. February 11-13, 2009, UNICEF New York http://www.web4dev.org/ - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] journal in ubuntu
On 22.12.2008, at 22:20, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:57 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 08:24, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: Currently I am without an XO, and the Journal doesn't work on Ubuntu, so I am trying to set up a workaround using qemu. I'll send examples as soon as I can. Qemu doesn't work either. A problem about 3dnow. I don't see a fix or workaround anywhere. The workaround is to substitute another kernel to the XO disk image: http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2008/12/emulating-latest-stable-olpc-xo.htm - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] journal in ubuntu
On 22.12.2008, at 23:24, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:57 PM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 22.12.2008, at 22:20, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:57 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 08:24, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: Currently I am without an XO, and the Journal doesn't work on Ubuntu, so I am trying to set up a workaround using qemu. I'll send examples as soon as I can. Qemu doesn't work either. A problem about 3dnow. I don't see a fix or workaround anywhere. The workaround is to substitute another kernel to the XO disk image: http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2008/12/emulating-latest-stable-olpc-xo.htm Page does not exist. Ah, here it is. You dropped a letter. http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2008/12/emulating-latest-stable-olpc-xo.html So, can you upload the working image to a server somewhere, and put the information in the Wiki? Then we can see whether it works in Ubuntu Linux. That blog post does link to the working image. To use it in Qemu you would have to change the xorg config to use the vesa driver, not the vmware one. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] journal in ubuntu
On 23.12.2008, at 03:26, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 2:31 PM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 22.12.2008, at 23:24, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:57 PM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 22.12.2008, at 22:20, Edward Cherlin wrote: or workaround anywhere. The workaround is to substitute another kernel to the XO disk image: http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2008/12/emulating-latest-stable-olpc-xo.html Do you mean http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/VMWare-8.2-767-bf.zip? The image file is Virtual Disk-flat.vmdk, right? To use it in Qemu you would have to change the xorg config to use the vesa driver, not the vmware one. How? Oh, I see the first step. qemu-img for converting formats. Let's get all this into the Wiki, shall we? OK, I made it into a qcow2 file, which boots to the command line and stops, and has too big a window. I assume that there are a few further steps missing in the conversion. Don't know. Alternatively someone could redo the steps I outlined using Qemu rather than VMWare. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Flash at Sugar Labs
On 05.01.2009, at 05:24, John Watlington wrote: On Jan 4, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Wade Brainerd wrote: Currently Sugar is incapable of running software which is not specifically designed for it. Sugar runs simpler SWF applications just fine, through the Browser. They don't have to be designed for Sugar. I think this goes besides the original point of Bryan. He is well aware that software needs to be specifically designed for Sugar, and wether this is good or bad is not the current debate. The point is what tools one can use to implement a proper Sugar activity. Bryan says the tools many content developers are familiar with are HTML, Javascript, and Flash. So how could an activity look like that can be authored primarily using Adobe's Flash tools? I think it would be relatively easy to come up with an activity template that just has a subdirectory for SWF content. Creating an SWF activity then would involve copying the template, editing the meta data, putting the SWF content into the directory, zipping it up and voila, a nice XO bundle. That process could easily be done by a script, even on Windows. IMHO that activity should be a wrapper for Gnash, perhaps as a native GTK+ application, without the browser baggage (maybe such a stand- alone player does exist already?). Since the content is authored specifically for Sugar (and in Nepal's case even more specifically for Sugar on the OLPC XO-1) it can easily be tuned to work well in Gnash. Hopefully Gnash's current limitations are well documented so authors can avoid pitfalls. That sugarized SWF player could even be extended to integrate nicely with the Journal (being able to do that is the point of having a free implementation after all) - there is no need to be compatible with Adobe's Flash player. My 1/50 € ... - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] idea for Sugar slogan and name
I guess Bryan thinks of it as a play on Mathland (in Papert's sense, not the curriculum of the same name). The name of squeakland.org was inspired by the same idea: What would happen if children who can’t do math grew up in Mathland, a place that is to math what France is to French? --S.P. Also see http://www.kusasa.org/background/mathland/mathland.html - Bert - On 12.01.2009, at 06:36, Wade Brainerd wrote: I personally prefer 'Sugar' over 'Sugarland'. The latter seems a bit like another world, where I think people want to be educated to succeed in the real one. SugarLand might appeal more to children. But then we would also want to make the UI less focused and more like a video game, which I don't necessarily agree with. Best, Wade On 1/11/09, Bryan Berry br...@olenepal.org wrote: my apologies ;) What do you guys think? Playground : Where kids learn and play or SugarLand: where kids learn and play or Sugar: Where kids learn and play w/ transpositions of learn and play On Sun, 2009-01-11 at 19:05 +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Btw, we are having this discussion in the development list, thus only including geeks :p [adding iaep and marketing to cc] On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 17:54, imm ian.m.macart...@talktalk.net wrote: On 11 Jan 2009, at 15:43, Bryan Berry wrote: Sugar: A Place to Play and Learn I have trouble saying this 3x quickly due to the repetition of the Pla sound. It may sound trivial but it does affect our ability to repeat it often and consistently Yes - me too, that's why I thought the Learn and Play form flowed better... I liked the sounds of that first form, but the concept of the second form. -- imm ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Technical Report on OLPC Etoys
A new Technical Report has been posted to the VPRI website, titled Etoys for One Laptop Per Child by Scott Wallace, Yoshiki Ohshima, and Yours Truly: http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php Abstract We present an overview of the “OLPC Etoys” system, describe the intensive two-year development effort that produced the system, and discuss lessons learned. OLPC Etoys is an end-user authoring system for children, which was chosen to be distributed with the OLPC XO laptops at an early stage of the OLPC project. Since we planned to derive OLPC Etoys by evolving an existing, mature system (“Squeakland”), it was expected to be a relatively straightforward undertaking. However, the OLPC XO platform’s special hardware characteristics, the evolution of the Sugar software stack, and the fundamentally international and multilingual nature of the project, all conspired to make the development effort challenging. Over the two-year course of the project, we successfully kept up with the challenges, and delivered usable Etoys systems for every OLPC release. We steadily improved the UI, added a few high-leverage features, and fixed bugs, with a small and widely-distributed team and with help from the community. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] irc logs
I for one would appreciate automatic logs, freely accessible, fully indexed. If someone is tallying votes: +1 for logs - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] using the insert function block in turtle art
On 07.02.2009, at 14:13, Paul Schulz wrote: - Is there another application I could use? Did you try Etoys? It's the shooting star icon. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] activites known not to either work at all or not on certin platforms
On 11.02.2009, at 10:59, Morgan Collett wrote: etoys This is packaged, but I think we're still missing a bit - the actual sugar activity for etoys. I don't personally have the time to work on it because I'm working on the above (and the actual glucose packages). What needs to be done there? Can anybody else package this? The activity is here: Bundle: http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-99.xo Tarball: http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Etoys/Etoys-99.tar.gz - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS - Another Snapshot
On 22.02.2009, at 17:31, Aleksey Lim wrote: On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 04:20:13PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote: Why did you exclude Etoys, which was included and working fine in previous versions of SoaS? do not worry Bert :) etoys is nashe vse and its part of sugar-fructose(prev. activities are honey) Excuse my rusty Russian, I don't quite get (our all?) I downloaded Soas-200902201251 and in contrast to previous versions Etoys was not there, and I wondered why. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Interesting game described in latest ACM technews
Fraunhofer is an umbrella organization for many more-or-less independent research institutes. I would not condemn one institute for what another did do. - Bert - On 25.02.2009, at 22:27, Walter Bender wrote: memory serves you correctly... -walter On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: If memory serves, Fraunhofer is the research institute which aggressively licenses its audio patent in MPEG-1 Layer 3 (or MP3) On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 10:15 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote: Is anyone affiliated with this organization? http://www.fraunhofer.de/EN/press/pi/2009/02/ResearchNews022009Topic3.jsp ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] First competitor?
I think the only obvious deficiency is the missing frame key. Without it Sugar is much less usable. A second issue is that the UI is designed towards a relatively small physical display size. Using the same proportions (say, frame-width-to- screen-size ratio) makes it appear bulky on a big screen, adjusting the proportions feels like space is being wasted (say, on the home screen). Other design decisions don't even work well on the XO, and perhaps people just assume it would be better there (like hover palettes). Possibly standard PC also means standard OS, and we do know that currently Sugar works best with the OLPC OS. - Bert - On 27.02.2009, at 14:27, Eben Eliason wrote: Sugar is a very good interface for the OLPC computers it was made for, but many of the design decisions and interfaces don't work nearly as well on standard PCs. I'm curious what people think about this statement. I tend to agree that some design decisions were biased toward the XO-1 hardware, but I don't think that any of the decisions actually fail on a standard PC, and I actually think Sugar scales pretty well in terms of interaction. However, if we can assume their perspective and locate some areas which aren't ideal on all hardware, perhaps we can work on resolving them. Anyone have some examples? - Eben On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 3:45 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: It claims to be a standalone home computer environment for kids, not a classroom environment. On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: ,Josh williams wrote: Looks like a Microsoft project, they're hosted on IIS and the site is written in ASP. Might also be a bad choice of web hosting provider. The entire ISO image contains free software. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ \X/ 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] [support-gang] Activities Under Emulation
On 01.03.2009, at 06:17, Caryl Bigenho wrote: Will the following specific activities work under emulation: Jonas already mentioned that the term emulation is probably not what you meant - I assume you simply mean Sugar on non-XO hardware? Or specifically in a Linux emulator running under Windows or Mac OS? There should not be a difference between that and Linux running natively, as what is emulated is simply a PC. EToys? It works in SoaS, Wolfgang's LiveCD, and an emulated XO. Squeak? That's the first I hear of a Squeak activity ... where can I find it? - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] The Road to SoaS-2: A new Snapshot!
On 04.03.2009, at 20:58, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: Hi folks, a new soas-2 snapshot is ready for you! Go and grab it NOW from here: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas-200903041854.iso It's important for us to get as much feedback as possible now, since with the recent release of Sugar 0.84, we're also approaching a release of Sugar on a Stick. In fact, this can already happen at the end of this week. So please go ahead, give it a try and report any issues you come across. Tried to run this in VMWare. It reports an error in the initramfs (losetup says there is no loop device) and stops. For easier identification after download, could you rename the files to Soas2-...? I also tried 1/Soas-200903051021.iso which worked fine as ever. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SoaS-2] Feature Complete? Another Snapshot.
On 07.03.2009, at 07:44, Costello, Rob R wrote: Whats the difference between soas and soas-2? Soas-2 is experimental, based on Fedora 11. Soas-1 is more stable. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS-2] Feature Complete? Another Snapshot.
On 06.03.2009, at 20:33, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: Hi folks, there's another snapshot of soas-2 ready for testing! There will be another snapshot on this Sunday to have an up2date image for bug triaging sessions. It's really important for us to get as much feedback as possible in this state of soas-2, since we'd like to get a release rolled out soonish and should have all blockers fixed beforehand, right? http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200903061846.iso Boots in VMWare now, great! * You can now enjoy builds of Read and EToys - cool, heh? I do not see Etoys installed. * As already mentioned, from now on, all images will contain the SoaS version number to avoid confusion. Where? In the About box it just says Fedora 10.91 Rawhide and 0.84.0. And I noticed TurleArt does not start, it's missing the numpy.oldnumeric module. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Press release picked up by MarketWatch via PR Newswire
On 16.03.2009, at 14:03, Sean DALY wrote:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/sugar-labs-nonprofit-announces-new/story.aspx?guid=
{EF4B8934-0046-465F-AD4D-E82FBCE8F1EC}dist=msr_7
Nice text.
But next time you let someone fake a screenshot, you should have them
clean it up more carefully.
- Bert -
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] meetup in Europe
On 27.03.2009, at 16:19, Simon Schampijer wrote: Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Dear Sugar people, has been proposed a meetup in Europe during May, with the objectives of having some face-to-face time, reflect on the now past release of 0.84 (and the upcoming 0.86), get to know better the new contributors that joined us recently and have fun in general. As a start, how well works for people to meet in Prague during the weekend of the 16th? Regards, Tomeu One week earlier or one week later would be a bit better for me. But I will make it somehow in any case. One week earlier might work for me. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Call for Testers (New Snapshot!)
On 04.04.2009, at 00:17, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200904031934.iso This does not boot in VMWare Fusion. It stops after writing out initrd. 0..ready. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar on MacBook...still no go
On 24.04.2009, at 07:41, Caryl Bigenho wrote: Hi, I tried all sorts of things with the file that I have downloaded twice now. I seem to be able to unzip it, but it converts to .vdi and when I click on it to open it, this is the message I get: The document “soas-beta-1.vdi” could not be opened. The file is too large. This is the file that is supposed to have everything needed in one neat package that lives on the MacBook. It isn't supposed to be a document. You seem to have overlooked my response on what to do with the .vdi file. It's *not* as simple as double-clicking yet, but simpler than most of the other methods. Note that it will *only* run on one a Mac with Intel processor, not on a G4. Is there a secret to unzipping this thing so it can be used? No, simply unzipping is fine. Is there a way to open the .vdi file and run Sugar? Yes, you need to use it in VirtualBox. I replied yesterday with a step- by-step procedure: Begin forwarded message: From: Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de Date: 23. April 2009 13:15:38 MESZ To: Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com Cc: IAEP SugarLabs iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: Re: [IAEP] .zip turned into .vdi What now? On 23.04.2009, at 08:14, Caryl Bigenho wrote: Hello Again, Still trying to get SoaS going on my MacBook. I downloaded the soas-beta-1.zip. It took a long time (almost 2 hrs on dsl). It's big, 350 MB. So 2 hours would indicate a download speed of 400 kbit/sec. Depending on what DSL speed you pay for that might well be as fast as it goes. http://compnetworking.about.com/od/dsldigitalsubscriberline/f/dslspeed.htm On my DSL (6000 kbit/sec) it still took 9 minutes. I finally had time to look at it and try to use it and discovered that it no longer is a zip file. Somehow it turned into soas- beta-1.vdi Was that supposed to happen? What do I do with it now? It is asking what application I want to use to open it. The file is the same size as the zip file (357 MB) so it looks like the same file...just with a different extension. Is there a way to change it back? It's fine. The .zip contains a single file named .vdi so it is uncompressed automatically. VDI means Virtualbox Disk I guess. After downloading, run VirtualBox. Click New to open the New Virtual Machine Wizard. Click Next. Choose a name (SoaS), OS (Linux), Version (Fedora). Click Next. Choose the memory (256 MB is fine). Click Next. Choose the disk: click Existing The Virtual Media Manager opens. Click Add. Find soas-beta-1.vdi, click Open, then Select, then Next. Click Finish. You're done! Now whenever you run VirtualBox, just choose SoaS from the list and click Start to run it. Don't worry if it appears to hang after writing something about loading initrd0.img, it will continue eventually. Note that VirtualBox captures your mouse pointer, to escape, press the left Cmd key. Have fun with SoaS on your Mac :) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Logic simulator
On 04.05.2009, at 19:46, Frederick Grose wrote: Some links to promote exploration: http://www.squeakland.org/download/ - brower plugins are available to run Etoys (Seems to be limited to x86 or i386 for the Linux - Debian download.) On the website, yes. Debian has a 64 bit version, too, though it does not yet have the 64 bit sound fix. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] School Report and request for help replicating some SoaS bugs.
On 05.05.2009, at 20:00, Caroline Meeks wrote: On the mac's they seemed to boot fine from the CD+USB but there was some sort of problem with the screen. I've attached a pic, has anyone else seen it? Looks a lot like what I reported for the Mac mini: http://www.mail-archive.com/iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org/msg03875.html If I'm not mistaken the Macbook uses the same Intel graphics chip as the Mac mini. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] versus, not
On 07.05.2009, at 13:55, Antoine van Gelder wrote: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ Very interesting read, thank you. Highly recommended, and on second thought even highly on-topic. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] versus, not
On 08.05.2009, at 16:05, Kathy Pusztavari wrote: I'll have to admit I don't have much right to request, complain, or even discuss. If I don't get off my butt and program something myself then I'm part of the problem. I think you misunderstood Walter. You can earn community credit not only by coding. Many more things need doing. Not to discourage you from programming, of course, but other skills and contributions are more than welcome, too. Its An Education Project, right? :) - Bert - But I'll tell you, it is difficult to start in this programming environment where the learning curve is extremely steep (coming from Oracle and PL/SQL stored procedures). I'm still trying to figure out WHERE to start playing with Python let alone how. -Kathy -Original Message- From: Walter Bender We must engage teachers and learners even if we do not have consensus on all aspects of learning theories, FOSS, or Sugar. Without the engagement, we don't grow. Even more important, without the engagement, we don't learn. That doesn't mean we don't have opinions or direction. We have a long ways to go and we need to keep debating as we go. But also we need to continue doing. And always be asking Are there other ways to approach this? and How might we make this better? ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] soas live cd on MacBook? How?
Note that much of the appeal of SoaS comes from not requiring to modify the machine it is about to run on. So rEFIt is no option for general use, it's not what we could recommend to teachers. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] SugarCamp Berlin
On 31.05.2009, at 21:45, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 21:32, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: With Sean's highly likely, we have five attendees:) I'll start putting together a event wiki where we can work on the logistics. Be sure to invite your friends and neighbours. Particularly those with an interest in Sugar who will already be at LinuxTag. Btw, the other day I dreamed that we were in a SugarCamp in Brazil, staying in an apartment similar to Sean's (but with furniture) where we ate excellent but very weird asiatic-looking food. Many of the attendants of the last SugarCamp were there and also several new female members. Will keep you posted about further precognitive sugar-related dreams. Yours truly, Tomeu Hehe, you should come to Porto Alegre then :) http://squeakland.org/squeakfest/brasil - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: [Edu-sig] Python flavoured Scratch
This might interest some of the Pythonistas ... - Bert - Begin forwarded message: From: Jurgis Pralgauskis jurgis.pralgaus...@gmail.com Date: 3. Juni 2009 23:45:21 MESZ To: edu-...@python.org edu-...@python.org Subject: [Edu-sig] Python flavoured Scratch Hi, probably most of You know Scratch http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Educators I thought it has quite some pythonic approach (especially, because it is easy to learn), so I tried to localize it to Python ;)... You can see the results (and comparison screenshots) http://files.akl.lt/users/jurgis/scratch/python_flavour/ well, parentheses seem to get in a way a bit.. value assignment = and += looks ok also clauses look nice -- other languages wouldn't manage this ;) there are problems with placeholders order for lists, but it will be fixed for Scratch 1.4 (comming in 2 weeks) http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=130068 also there is problem with logical equality comparison it is hardcoded somewhere, so I can't change = to == :/ (but Scratch is opensourced, so this is quite feasible :)) Also Scratch uses messages instead of functions. this is more like throwing/catching exceptions, but still different so I left this as is When message blabla received ps.: What's the use of all this? well, students could get more used to python while Scratching then it is possible to export Scratch scripts to xml with Chirp http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/ so one can translate them to python Scratch quite follows LOGO paradigm, so xturtle could be mapped to it somehow, I guess.. by the way, XO TurtleArt has python bindings http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2009/02/using-python-blocks-in-turtleart.html -- Jurgis Pralgauskis Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;) http://sagemath.visiems.lt ___ Edu-sig mailing list edu-...@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] collaboration testing session
On 05.06.2009, at 06:09, David Van Assche wrote: Hi folks, We are having a collaborative sugar testing session next week Wednesday 10th June at 20:00 UTC (That is 4 pm EDT, 3pm EST, 2 pm CST, 1 pm MST, and 12 pm PST, most of Europe that will be 9 pm, 8 pm for the UK) So you mean 19:00 UTC (because of daylight saving): http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=6day=10year=2009hour=19min=0sec=0p1=0 - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Grassroots-l] collaborative testing session (tomorrow's meeting) reminder
On 09.06.2009, at 16:16, David Van Assche wrote: Hi folks, This is a reminder about the collaborative sugar testing session we are having tomorrow, Wednesday 10th June at 20:00 UTC (That is 4 pm EDT, 3pm EST, 2 pm CST, 1 pm MST, and 12 pm PST, most of Europe that will be 9 pm, 8 pm for the UK) Yet again I have to point out you are talking about 19:00 UTC, which on June 10th is 4 pm EDT, 3pm EST, 2 pm CST, 1 pm MST, and 12 pm PST, most of Europe that will be 9 pm, 8 pm for the UK http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=6day=10year=2009hour=19min=0sec=0p1=0 - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion
On 11.06.2009, at 09:51, Sean DALY wrote: ultimately, the question is: are there (or not) Activities common to every, or nearly every instance of Sugar? Browse Read Write etc. At least the Fructose activities should always be there: http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/ - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion
On 11.06.2009, at 15:17, Walter Bender wrote: Maybe Getting Started might be a better name? How about Basics? - Bert - Just to complicate things, Nubae and I were discussing collaboration on IRC. It is another theme people may be interested in searching. Activities that a whole class can share, e.g., Browse, and activities that are designed as duets. -walter On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Sean DALYsdaly...@gmail.com wrote: Bert - many thanks, I understand much better now. We're expecting a traffic peaks at the end of the month with our media push, that's why this work on clarity/simplicity is important. I'm afraid Fructose as a left-hand category on ASLO is obscure, it really should be base or core or base install, this last I like best because it's very clear. Note: a search for Fructose in ASLO returns no results! I actually don't think it's that hard to set a list; it's really just a Get Started list which covers online/offline, younger/older Learners, and super-helpful to have even if off-ring (Terminal...). I agree some deployments will want to zap some Activities, but as long as it's clear that there's no technical barrier to doing so we're fine. The list of 13 Fructose Activities at http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/ does not match the list of 11 Fructose Activities on ASLO (http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/browse/type:1/cat:112?sort=name ). I imagine Image is off the bus (replaced by Image Viewer), but is the omission of Write intentional? I couldn't find it on ASLO at all :-( (N.B. Write is always the first Activity I choose to demonstrate classroom collaboration; people understand collaboration instantly when each of two machines can edit the same document live. My kids' nanny who is in her early 60s and does not use computers understood right away the usefulness of XOs in a classroom when she saw that, she got all excited and started asking me questions!) So I think the ASLO Fructose list, plus Write, can certainly be qualified as 12 base install Activities: Browse Calculate Chat Etoys ImageViewer Jukebox Log Pippy Read Terminal TurtleArt Write However I think it would be judicious to add Help to this list. Help is very reassuring during discovery of the totally unfamiliar interface. I'm aware there are issues right now building a new Help from the FLOSS Manuals source, but I believe Help aids teachers and parents significantly with the Sugar GUI learning curve. Are there any other candidates today for the Fructose list we should consider? Not to open a can of worms - adjusting the pantheon is much less urgent than the discoverability/usability issues - but a review before each SoaS version seems judicious to me, especially since a choice needs to be made about which Activities are in the ring and which are off. I would suggest: Clock Help Maze Memorize Moon Read ETexts Speak Tux Paint I hesitated over: * Record which kids adore, but which I understand is iffy due to wide hardware variations, also teachers don't seem to like it much :-) * the TamTams which would make the list longish... (though my four-year-old figured out TamTam Mini in ten seconds the other day and loved every second with it) * GCompris Chess, since no 2-player yet. Our introduction to Sugar has a page with an attractive smorgasbord of Activities (http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=pagepage=about_activities ), and a link to ASLO. We listed the Activities in teacher/parent interest order: reassuring basics, net stuff, games/language/multimedia, the TamTams, tech/system utilities. Image Viewer and Jukebox are missing from this page, I propose to add them and two others to the matrix so the complete Fructose set (minus Image) is present. The Journal starts the list due to its special status, but it really should be broken out as a special Activity that is always there, saves everything automatically, allows resuming of work, etc. ASLO should have a brief mention of the Journal in the orientation intro I want to edit; telling inexperienced Sugar admins/teachers/parents/Learners that it is always in Sugar and can't be installed or uninstalled. This super-Activity distinction is important because the Journal icon occupies the same spot under the central XO avatar as the current Activity. Note that each icon links to the OLPC page (the intro site was published on a tight deadline just before the March 16th press release :-), I think we can update it to link to the ASLO pages now. Note: we have been doing some star marketing of Activities in our PR: Write, InfoSlicer, Mindmap, Portfolio. We chose these to appeal to teachers; they are differentiators. Some press articles have mentioned the star Activities, recognizing that they are interesting and unique to Sugar. Library for example is an Activity I'm not quite sure does what, but its name and
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1
On 17.06.2009, at 10:28, S Page wrote: On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:37 AM, Sebastian Dziallassebast...@when.com wrote: I'm very pleased to announce the first early preview of a new generation of SoaS XO-1 images. Excellent news, thanks! I indeed! Put them on a USB key or a SD card, plug them into your XO ... Yes! ... and execute: copy-nand u:\devxo-1.img or copy-nand sd:\devxo-1.img Nooo, I want to keep my working 8.2.1 in NAND. Can I simply boot my XO from the USB or SD card? No, these images are meant for NAND install. For USB/SD we'd need yet another image, OLPC used to provide ext3 ones. People should be aware that this is a one-way street. Once you run this new Sugar version, the Journal contents will be converted to a new format. AFAIK it cannot be reverted back to the older format. Actually, Sebastian, there should be a big WARNING in your announcements about this ... If not, is http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_backup_your_XO the best way to save my precious 8.2.1 image? Yes, that would be the only option to go back. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1
On 17.06.2009, at 12:56, Martin Dengler wrote: On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:41:05PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: What if we developers only announce in developer-oriented forums and someone else (marketing team?) takes the task of communicating it to end users? [...] I suggest transforming it into this instead: Beware of the target audience of the list you post to. If you are unsure if your message could be misinterpreted (e.g. if you are a geek with a message to end users) then consider passing it through someone more devoted to communicating (e.g. the marketing team). Good point, but I think the audience involved has self-selecting down to developer - tester. I don't think we need to be worried about anyone else. Do we need to worry about a person, who a) doesn't understand copy-nand but b) is subscribed to IAEP, suddenly deciding that they'll run mysterious commands on huge downloaded files and end up with something they didn't expect? I don't think that more than a handful of people will do that, if that. Many developers can't imagine with how little understanding actual end users approach tasks like this. Even slapping on a big WARNING sign does not really prevent them from severely damaging their system. For you it seems obvious nobody should undertake this unless they know exactly what they're doing. Which is precisely the problem. Saying that developers should not talk to users is only half a joke. It's often frustrating for both sides. You need someone who can think on both levels to mediate. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1
On 17.06.2009, at 14:09, Martin Dengler wrote: No, that's not the problem. It's people that don't know that they don't know what they're doing. My point is that I think we're worrying about people that a) want to be testers; and b) are so keen that they go copy-nanding (after getting a devkey, etc.) without understanding what they're doing. As I'm saying I don't think there are enough people like that on IAEP/sugar-devel to worry about, and you're saying there are (IIUC). I for one would *hope* that on the IAEP list many people do participate who are not necessarily familiar with technical details, but who care deeply about education. Care so much in fact that they are not even detained by these awkward instructions when they try to help. In know there were such people in the OLPC community, and hopefully we are not driving them away by too much tech-talk that is only remotely related to the actual educational goals of the project. Well, I'm happy to leave it at that. Me too. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 7th-grade biology
On 01.07.2009, at 10:14, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote:
I and others are starting a project in 7th-grade biology teaching and
learning, with a focus on pre-biotic and biological evolution, ...
Anybody interested?
Edward, see smartbug at http://rupert.id.au/schoolgamemaker/samples3/
Bugs start out with a matrix of random numbers which relate their
sensor input to motion output through a neural net. This represents
their genes. Random mutations in the genetic code happen each cell
division. They soon evolve optimum feeding patterns,
Programmed in Game Maker but should be doable in Etoys or Scratch
Sounds intriguing. Too bad I can't try it on my machine, but at least
I could extract the description from the gamemaker file which looks to
be detailed enough to recreate the simulation:
Smartbug
Tony Forster October 05
Evolution through natural selection
May be copied with acknowledgement
mouse click select, displays bug info including genetic code
p pause
c de-select all
a select all
d display detail: all, populationhealth, none
f save population stats to comma separated file
F1 to display this screen
escape return to simulation
The info boxes show the genetic code or the program the bugs have
developed by natural selection. You can see how the bugs are related.
(The level of information you display affects the program speed.)
The save to file option allows you to import population statistics
into a spread sheet and examine population trends
How its programmed
Each bug loses one unit of health per step
set variable bughealth relative to -1
If a bug runs out of food it dies
set variable bughealth relative to -1
if bughealth is smaller than 0
destroy the instance
If it eats food, its health increases
set variable bughealth relative to 150
If its health reaches 1000 it divides
if bughealth is larger than 1000
execute code:
bughealth=500
newid=instance_create(x+20,y+20,bug)
Its genes are copied to the new bug
for (i=0 ;i20; i+=1)
{
for (j=0;j12; j+=1)
{
newid.gene[i,j]= gene[i,j]
}
}
One gene is mutated
newid.gene[random(20),random(12)]=random(100)-50
The genes are used to determine behaviour
There are 20 inputs, 8 related to food nearby, 4 previous direction
and 8 memory stores
execute code:
input[0]= sign(instance_position(x+15,y,food))
input[1]= sign(instance_position(x-15,y,food))
input[2]= sign(instance_position(x,y+15,food))
input[3]= sign(instance_position(x,y-15,food))
input[4]= sign(instance_position(x+22,y,food))
input[5]= sign(instance_position(x-22,y,food))
input[6]= sign(instance_position(x,y+22,food))
input[7]= sign(instance_position(x,y-22,food))
for (i=8; i20; i+=1)
{
input[i] = sign(output[i-8])
}
The 20 inputs are multiplied by a 20x12 gene array to produce 12 outputs
for (i=0 ;i20; i+=1)
{
for (j=0;j12; j+=1)
{
newid.gene[i,j]= gene[i,j]
}
}
Four of which control motion
if (output[0]0)hspeed=-1
if (output[1]0)hspeed=1
if (output[2]0)vspeed=-1
if (output[3]0)vspeed=1
and eight are memory data
Discussion
See how badly adapted lifeforms become extinct:
The first to die are the ones that don't move
Soon they are all related through one ancestor
Diagonal movers take over from horizontal and vertical movers
They learn to spread out
Some get stuck with some food patterns and die
Run it overnight, eventually the learn to hunt for food.
Run it on 2 computers, compare the genetic code.
Enable save to file smartbug.txt with the f key
Import the comma separated text file into a spreadsheet
Graph it
What is the average bug population? Why?
What is the trend in food population? Why?
Why are there fluctuations?
Is it sexual or asexual reproduction?
What are the implications for the gene pool and the evolutionary
process?
Is this a good model of evolution?
Programming challenge
Write a version with sexual reproduction, when two bugs with
health1000 collide, they produce offspring with genetic code taken
randomly from its parents.
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Squeakers documentary (was Re: Physics)
On 01.07.2009, at 14:35, Alan Kay wrote: For example, one child Tyrone (shown in the Squeakers CD explaining all this) Squeakers is an award-winning documentary movie about teaching math and science using Etoys in the class room (made in 2002). It's in English and was subtitled by the Squeak community to quite a few languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Chinese and a few others. We gave out some DVDs at LinuxTag last week (you know who you are, care to comment once you've seen it? ;)). The individual chapters are available online http://squeakland.org/resources/audioVisual/ (though not converted to OGG yet, which is on the To Do list I think) At the very bottom of that page you can find a link to buy the subtitled NTSC DVD for $8. The subtitled PAL version (otherwise identical) can be purchased from Squeak e.V. Germany for 8€ iirc. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Squeakers documentary (was Re: Physics)
On 01.07.2009, at 17:40, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote: At Wed, 1 Jul 2009 15:33:14 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote: On 01.07.2009, at 14:35, Alan Kay wrote: For example, one child Tyrone (shown in the Squeakers CD explaining all this) Squeakers is an award-winning documentary movie about teaching math and science using Etoys in the class room (made in 2002). It's in English and was subtitled by the Squeak community to quite a few languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Chinese and a few others. We gave out some DVDs at LinuxTag last week (you know who you are, care to comment once you've seen it? ;)). The individual chapters are available online http://squeakland.org/resources/audioVisual/ (though not converted to OGG yet, which is on the To Do list I think) Very unfortunately, the Galileo moment when a girl pointed out the trick was edited out and not there in the DVD. Another TO DO would be to put that segment on the web also... ... and make a hi-def copy available. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] View Slides an alternative to PowerPoint?
Since this does not seem to be obvious: It's really simple to create nice presentations in Etoys, there is not even scripting involved: 0. Start a fresh Etoys copy (in Strawberry, right-click the Etoys icon and choose start rather than resuming the latest project) 1. click new project 2. From the supplies box in the toolbar, drag out a book. 3. Use the top-left button to toggle more book controls 4. Use the + button to add pages 5. Place text on a page by dragging out a Text from the supplies box, resize after right-clicking by dragging the yellow handle 6. Import images either via the clipboard or directly from the Journal (using the Journal icon in the top right) 7. Add annotations using the paint tool 8. Add visual and sound effects for turning pages in the book's menu. 9. Play with the options in the book's menu (like view pages full screen) etc. ... and of course you can place scripted objects / animations on the pages too if you like. Also, the Etoys QuickGuides (accessible from the left-most button in the toolbar) have an entire section on Books. - Bert - On 02.07.2009, at 09:43, David Van Assche wrote: A real simple alternative to powerpoint/impress that looks and smells like it, but with maybe really limited functionality would be loved by teachers everywhere, At least, all the teachers I have met rely very heavily on powerpoint in one form or another, be it integrated into other software like moodle or an LMS, or used with an interactive whiteboard/touchpad soft, or just used by itself. But normally it is used in a very limited fashion, and without much of the fancy transitions/coloring/themeing/graphing and all that stuff... IF they want something like that, it would make sense to steer them to turtleart... but there needs to be something much much simpler... David On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Walter Benderwalter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: And we also have Turtle Art as a presentation option (it can keep to a prearranged order :) -walter On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 4:04 PM, James Simmonsjim.simm...@walgreens.com wrote: I deleted the digest that contained someone asking about putting Open Office on an XO to get alternatives to Excel and PowerPoint, but I'd like to suggest that with the features I added to View Slides over the weekend you *could* use View Slides to create and view presentations. What you could do is create individual slides using the Record Activity or one of the Paint Activities. These would create separate image files in the Journal. Then you'd fire up View Slides to add these images to a slide show, arranging them in sequence by renaming the images in the show, and deleting images that aren't needed. Then View Slides could be used to view the presentation. You can even hide the mouse cursor and view the images full screen. It isn't Power Point, but on the other hand, it isn't Power Point. The pictures at http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4039 tell the story. Unfortunately they tell the story out of sequence. There doesn't seem to be any way to arrange the pictures in order. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] View Slides an alternative to PowerPoint?
On 02.07.2009, at 17:41, Jim Simmons wrote: David, I just checked out Google Docs for the first time and I'm impressed. It looks and feels very much like PowerPoint, and you can even download your finished presentation in PDF format for the Read activity. I think for teachers that depend on PowerPoint it's a reasonable answer. I haven't tried turtle art yet, but I like the idea of kids using it to create presentations. One of the useful ideas we get from Unix is having a lot of little tools that do just one thing that you can plug together with scripts to make something. I get the impression that turtle art is a bit like that. Or even my suggestion of using one of the paint Activities to make slides then combining them with View Slides might work. The thing is, PowerPoint is a terrible thing to give a kid. It gives him clip art that looks better than anything he could draw himself, fonts that look better than any text he could write, transitions that are fancier than anything he could program, and spell checking that corrects mistakes before he's even finished making them. It might make a teacher's life easier (and I'm not against that) but it would kill a kid's creative impulses. Fully agreed, so what's wrong with giving Etoys a try? - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] community influence on development
On 28.07.2009, at 07:22, Martin Dengler wrote: On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 03:24:13PM +0545, Daniel Drake wrote: However, I feel like it could be better if the community (who I might even stretch to call customers) could have more influence. [...] What are the options for the community having more of an influence here? Influence on whom? Developers? There are no SugarLabs employed developers. But if we get feedback from the front line, from teachers actually using our software in the field, the volunteer developers I know struggle to find a way to make it easier for them. Nothing beats direct contact with children of course, but even meeting teachers from the deployments and hearing first-hand accounts of the problems (and successes!) is rather motivating. Reading these reports on a mailing list is less emotionally moving but still a great hint at how to prioritize one's spare time. The problem is we get way too few feedback. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] community influence on development
On 30.07.2009, at 22:23, Martin Dengler wrote: On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 04:17:56PM -0300, Bert Freudenberg wrote: On 28.07.2009, at 07:22, Martin Dengler wrote: On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 03:24:13PM +0545, Daniel Drake wrote: However, I feel like it could be better if the community (who I might even stretch to call customers) could have more influence. [...] What are the options for the community having more of an influence here? Influence on whom? Developers? There are no SugarLabs employed developers. But if we get feedback from the front line, from teachers actually using our software in the field, the volunteer developers I know struggle to find a way to make it easier for them. Nothing beats direct contact with children of course, but even meeting teachers from the deployments and hearing first-hand accounts of the problems (and successes!) is rather motivating. Reading these reports on a mailing list is less emotionally moving but still a great hint at how to prioritize one's spare time. I don't disagree with anything you said, but I'm struggling to see how it's relevant to the OP or my reply. Perhaps by the volunteer developers I know struggle to find a way to make it easier for them you're implying that we need to make it easier for volunteer developers to contribute? No, I meant the volunteer developers are motivated largely by feedback from users of their software. They then do all they can (sometimes even struggling) to help. At least that's what I see with the Etoys developers, which is similar to Sugar in that it's not a scratch-your- own-itch open-source project. - Bert - The problem is we get way too few feedback. Indeed. - Bert - Martin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Labyrinth (was Re: SoaS as a Sugar Labs project)
On 26.08.2009, at 03:22, Gary C Martin wrote: -- Feature roadmap/Concept maps: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Concept_maps Me, me, ME!! ;-) No, actually Tomeu picked up Labyrinth sugarisation, then I did some UI polishing and hooked up extra features along with the talented Aleksey. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/ Labyrinth Oops. I never bothered to look at Labyrinth because it sounds nothing like a mind-map tool. We strayed quite a bit from the original activities-as-verbs idea ... (and yes I'm guilty too for not renaming Etoys) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.
On 26.08.2009, at 17:42, David Farning wrote: On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Michael Stonemich...@laptop.org wrote: Tomeu, Frankly Michael, the only way I can read these posts from you is that you are frustrated because we aren't churning more work, regardless of how much we have achieved that is relevant to OLPC deployments. Correct. I do not accept that work I have managed to do in the past is sufficient simply because it was the work that I was able to do. Instead, I form or disintegrate this acceptance with reference to three external measures: * absolute standards of quality, e.g. as formed by acceptance testing against written design goals or user experiences, * relative standards of quality as evidenced by the respect and participation of specific individuals whose judgment I trust and whose biases seem to me to control for some of my obvious biases, and * freeform standards of quality as evidenced by what other people have made from the work. I am therefore frustrated, for the reason you mention, because I believe that our work is achieves none of these standards of good enough. (Unsurprisingly, I'm frustrated for some other reasons too, but that's neither here nor there.) Do you have any actionable ideas about how to work better for our users? I perceive a double bind: I have lots of ideas, but ideas are cheap and seem most unwelcome here -- they're just talk instead of do, aren't they? Michael P.S - Maybe a reasonable compromise on the double bind would be for me to share a small number of ideas, or to share as many ideas fit into a fixed duration conversation in a different medium? An effective way to become a respected member of on open source community is to start with small ideas and implement them. If the deliverable works, is useful, and meets coding standards it will be accepted. A couple of iterations through this: a: Produce improvements to the product. b. Help the contributor earn the respect of the current community so they will be encourage to participate and take on larger projects. That tends to open doors. Drive by ventings tend to shut them. david I find dismissing Michael's points as drive by venting highly inappropriate. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] FSF attitude to xo and sugar
On 28.08.2009, at 11:33, Bill Kerr wrote: n Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 7:20 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: === Sugar Digest === 4. The recent FSF campaign condemning the use of Windows 7 in education (See http://windows7sins.org/) imputes OLPC in complicity with Microsoft. It is disappointing that the FSF is not making any constructive arguments in favor of free software alternatives to Windows such as Sugar on GNU/Linux, which is currently shipped on every machine distributed by OLPC. http://windows7sins.org/#1 When I first saw it I interpreted that page as contrasting the xo as a positive alternative to Windows (and still think that is a valid interpretation) When I read what walter wrote above later I was shocked to realise that it could indeed be interpreted the way walter has, as well On revisiting I can't see any clarifying text there You need to click the Learn more link next to the XO picture. Citing from that concoction: As a result, it is expected that the main effect of the OLPC project -- if it succeeds -- will be to turn millions of children into Microsoft dependents. That is a negative effect, to the point where the world would be better off if the OLPC project had never existed. The project tragically became yet another example of Microsoft exerting its control to ends harmful to society's freedom. It's tragic how they undermine their allies' efforts in their blind zealousness. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Fwd: w7sins FUD
Thanks to all who made the FSF change this. - Bert - On 02.09.2009, at 08:14, Bill Kerr wrote: Yes the new paragraph is more reasonable: Microsoft is now targeting governments who are purchasing XOs, in an attempt to get them to replace the free software with Windows. It remains to be seen to what degree Microsoft will succeed. But with all of this pressure, Microsoft has harmed a project that has distributed more than 1 million laptops running free software, and has taken aim at the low-cost platform as a way to make poor children around the world dependent on its products. The OLPC threatens to become another example of the way Microsoft convinces governments around the world that an education involving computers must be synonymous with an education using Windows. In order to prevent this, it is vital that we work to raise global awareness of the harm Microsoft's involvement does to our children's education. On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 1:08 AM, Bobby Powers bobbypow...@gmail.com wrote: in any case, the text appears to be fixed now in a much more reasonable fashion. bobby On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Sebastian Silvasebast...@fuentelibre.org wrote: 2009/8/31 Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com I don't think anyone on this list was suggesting that Windows on OLPC was/is a good/appropriate solution for learning. But there is a free software alternative, Sugar, that is designed to be appropriated by the local community/culture. We were asking, why doesn't the FSF promote alternatives (Sugar or some other free learning platform) in parallel with their anti-cultural-imperialism message? -walter ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Which Language?
On 27.09.2009, at 00:17, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada (705) 250-0112) wrote: -- I do not have a XO ... I've heard it has a LOGO variant called Etoys ? (can Etoys read a camera image?) Etoys is built on a Smalltalk variant called Squeak, but yes, it can access the XO-1's camera. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Which Language?
On 28.09.2009, at 17:36, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada (705) 250-0112) wrote: J, like APL, sadly does not get the publicity that it deserves. A fate it shares with other nice languages. Like, err, Smalltalk. I would not be surprised if Roger Hui were willing to create an implementation of J for the XO if that were necessary. Please report back when this is done. Worked for, err, Smalltalk. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sdenka Salas's book about the xo and sugar
On 30.09.2009, at 17:10, Bill Kerr wrote: from walter's digest: 2. Sdenka Salas, a teacher who is working with Andean children from Aymara and Quechua communities, wrote a book in April about using Sugar in the classroom. She recently completed the English-language version. She has kindly made it available for download (See [http://www.scribd.com/doc/20189623/The-XO-Laptop-in-the-Classroom]). I just had a quick look at this and it looks great - Go here to download the PDF: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sdenka_Salas_-_The_XO_Laptop_in_the_Classroom - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Any ideas how to make an image with a transparent background inSugar?
About how to get the drawing out of Etoys: Drag-and-drop it into the Sugar Frame's clipboard, or just press Ctrl- C when its halo is showing. Then either insert into the activity you want directly by drag-and- drop or Ctrl-V (if the activity supports that), or store the clipping in the Journal via its Frame clipboard icon menu. - Bert - On 02.10.2009, at 04:30, Alan Kay wrote: Hi Caroline I think what you want to do is to take that picture of the caterpillar and erase all but the caterpillar? To do that you want to repaint the picture (it is already an image). First get the halos (which every object in Etoys will show) by right clicking on the picture. There is balloon help on most things in Etoys, and each halo handle will say what it does. For example, to duplicate your picture, drag on the green button in the upper right corner. A duplicate copy will drag off. To put something in the trash, click on the move to trash handle in the upper left corner. -- To repaint, click on the repaint handle on the right side, mid height. There is help about most things in Etoys under the ? on the Sugar menu bar. For doing your task, I like to choose no color in the paint palette (it's the bar over the color rainbow). Then I will choose various sizes of the circular brushes to do the work of removing the background. The Undo in the paint box will undo one whole stroke. When done, click on Keep in the paint box. If you want to start over, click on Toss. You now have a picture of the caterpillar with transparent fill around it. The PNG format (a standard open source format) will allow the picture to be filed with the transparent fill preserved. I'm presuming that the reverse of the process you used to get the image into Etoys will get it back to where you want to use it. For a nice way to animate a wriggling caterpillar, you can also look at the example in Sdenka Salas' recent book of the XO in Peru. Don't hesitate to ask more questions. Best wishes, Alan From: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com To: Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com Cc: iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Sent: Thursday, October 1, 2009 6:41:26 PM Subject: Re: [IAEP] Any ideas how to make an image with a transparent background inSugar? Thanks Alan, Where should I look to figure out Etoys paint. I'm stuck and there is no kid here to teach me! http://screencast.com/t/4lvde8qWV2pD On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 9:32 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Paint it in Etoys, save as a .PNG picture Cheers, Alan From: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com To: iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Sent: Thursday, October 1, 2009 6:28:22 PM Subject: [IAEP] Any ideas how to make an image with a transparent background inSugar? http://screencast.com/t/K0lH5L7tsBU I am trying to make a new character for cartoon builder. The video explains my goals. Basically I want to take a picture and cut out just the caterpillar and have it be cropped/transparent background. thanks, Caroline -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugarcamp Bolzano 2009 [1]Register [2]Planning Meeting
On 08.10.2009, at 19:34, Simon Schampijer wrote: Hey, [1] Register: As many of you know the next Sugarcamp will be from 7th to 13th November 2009 in Bolzano, Italy - http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Events/Sugarcamp_Bolzano_2009 . If you want to attend - please add your name to the wiki page! We originally included the weekend (7, 8th of November), to be sure to make it possible for people that work or go to school to attend, too. If that is important for you, please reply to this email and state so. Rita and I intend to come, but only for the weekend. We are working, kids need to go to school etc. So if possible, yes, please start on the weekend. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Montessori madness...
On 12.10.2009, at 10:55, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: I've been reading Montessori Madness for a few hours now, and I find Another good one is Montessori Today http://www.amazon.com/Montessori-Today-Comprehensive-Education-Adulthood/dp/080521061X The funny thing is that since I've been exposed to Bryan Berry's poignant theory of education, I can't help looking at Montessori and thinking that it is excellent, but not [insert just here] because Montessori's approach and materials are inherently better. It is excellent because - Montessori teachers are teachers who are clearly smart and passionate about education, and the school environment (principals, etc) share the smarts and the passion. - Parents sending kids to a Montessori school are smart and passionate about education. - The group of kids is small and manageable, so the smart and passionate teachers can work their magic. And that wins. They could teach with computers, or abacuses or post it notes or books written in Esperanto. It's all a catalyst that brings the 3 (purely human!) elements above together. Indirection. A social mind trick. Of course, I like most of Montessori's approach. But remove the human elements and... poof! it's effects will be gone. Montessori strategies in a crowded group with an unenthusiastic teacher have very slim chances. While this rings true the Montessori materials *are* definitely helpful to let kids explore a wide range of topics on their own (after an introduction by the teachers or older children of course). You don't find these materials in a regular school. - Bert (Montessori parent) - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] scratch gone missing
On 07.11.2009, at 04:48, Bill Kerr wrote: On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:10, Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com wrote: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/browse/type:1/cat:107 How come scratch is no longer available for sugar? (the link is to the programming category of sugar activities) You mean Scratch was available in ASLO but isn't any more? No but it should be there since Scratch has a far better UI than Etoys Agreed on the should be there part. As for better UI: Scratch does what it does incredibly well. If all you want to do can be done in Scratch then it is an excellent tool. Etoys is way more powerful, but comparatively hard to get into. OTOH Etoys does integrate into Sugar reasonably well, unlike Scratch. If platform conformity was the sole criterium for better UI then Etoys would win hands down, with its Journal and Collaboration support. But another, maybe even more important difference is that Etoys is an open-source community project. So if there is an Etoys itch you know how to scratch (pun intended): patches welcome :) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] scratch gone missing
On 07.11.2009, at 23:28, Bill Kerr wrote: On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:43 PM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 07.11.2009, at 04:48, Bill Kerr wrote: On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:10, Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com wrote: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/browse/type:1/cat:107 How come scratch is no longer available for sugar? (the link is to the programming category of sugar activities) You mean Scratch was available in ASLO but isn't any more? No but it should be there since Scratch has a far better UI than Etoys Agreed on the should be there part. As for better UI: Scratch does what it does incredibly well. If all you want to do can be done in Scratch then it is an excellent tool. Etoys is way more powerful, but comparatively hard to get into. thanks for replying Bert I'm not sure what you mean by Etoys being way more powerful. I would agree that Kedama, the parallel tile particle system, is way more powerful than anything in Scratch. Did you have something more in mind? Yes, too many to list all in fact. The power of Scratch lies in its limited scope - several years of development and refinement went into it to find the smallest set of features that make it easily teachable while still broadly applicable. There are others who could describe the Squeak/Etoys philosophy better than me, but one of its core ideas is no limits. Where Scratch is a closed environment, Etoys provides just a thin layer of visual scripting on top of a much larger system. There are literally hundreds of objects that can be used as building blocks, from basic ones like rectangles, ellipses, polygons, or text, to complex ones like a book or a MIDI sequencer or video player or a working chess game (in Scratch there are only bitmap-sprites). In Etoys you can change coordinate systems, or embed objects into each other creating hierarchical animations, or connect objects with arrows to create diagrams that are fully scriptable, etc. In Scratch, every Sprite is separate, and they can communicate with others only by broadcasting - this is more limited but much easier to learn, and less prone to errors. And if all that is not enough (there are always things the designers can't anticipate) Etoys lets you escape to the full Squeak environment. While Scratch is implemented in Squeak too, you cannot access it. Again that limitation was a conscious trade-off (for example it enables players for Scratch projects to be implemented in other languages). Here are a few examples of my own projects in the Squeak showcase that I think would be hard to recreate in Scratch. Collision Physics http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7052 (objects with collision sensors adding their forces to influence motion, this one is pure Etoys) OLPC-XO-Display http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7050 (adds a new Squeak class to simulate the pixel pattern of the XO's display) Euros http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7055 (connects to a web service to get currency conversion rate using a few lines of Squeak scripting) For teachers the ability to make an easy start with a program is very important. When teaching a group then if several students encounter something they can't solve then it creates huge problems, especially for difficult to manage classes. And even for more advanced students features that are easy to find and work smoothly are important so that they can focus clearly on the challenging learning (scripting) rather than hunting around for where the tools are. There are a whole lot of features in Scratch that makes this possible (as you acknowledge). I haven't spelt out those features in detail here but will run some more tests and attempt to do so soon. One of my students mentions some of them here: http://soeasyman123.blogspot.com/2009/11/great-race.html I found Etoys very troublesome for a few reasons. 1. was because whenever I tried to save it would just close the program and I would jsut simply lose all my work. this occurred to me 3 times. 2. I couldn't view the scripts while having the cars move because the scripts would get in the way of the test. 3. the scripts were always in the way of the pictures so i had to close them everytime i finished with them which was very time consuming. 4. the drawing tools on Etoys aren't the greatest tools you could get. Although these reasons were troublesome I found Etoys interesting because there were so many scripts and other things to play with 1 sounds like a bug. 2 and 3 can be resolved by arranging the scripts so that the scripted objects only cover a smaller portion of the screen (like in Scratch). 4 is true, patches welcome ;) One of the fundamental Etoys ideas is that authoring is always on, hence there are no designated screen areas reserved
Re: [IAEP] A Couple of Comments/Questions
On 18.11.2009, at 10:46, adam hyde wrote: On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 10:42 +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote: @timClicks Can't do. FLOSS Manuals inexplicably uses GPL for everything, which is more restrictive than Creative Commons. creative commons is not very useable. ever looked at the jurisdiction, collection or interoperability clauses? if all content is in gpl u can use it anywhere. if all content is in cc-x-[region] you can pretty much only use it elsewhere under cc-x-[region] adam Yes, GPL works wonderfully in its own closed world. It's just that the FLOSS world is larger than GNU. If Sdenka was to relicense her work under GPL it could be added to FLOSS Manuals - however, further contributions by others couldn't be used as freely as her original. E.g., there are wonderful lesson plans for Etoys in there, but updated or translated versions could not be included with Etoys if we wanted to. I heard you are looking into supporting dual-licensing on FLOSS Manuals. Any contribution would automatically be made under both the GPL and the work's own license. This should make licensing a much less severe issue. Any progress on that front? - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SoaS] Please help suggest illustrated eBooks for Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry launch
On 27.11.2009, at 02:15, Tim McNamara wrote: Max Moritz is in the public domain. It would be a wonderful addition to the collection, if possible. Does anyone know whether it is available? Excellent suggestion! It's here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17161 - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sharing EToys projects
On 07.12.2009, at 21:54, Dave Bauer wrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com wrote: Tomeu, There is no mime type that I can see. The Journal entry simply says File filename.pr from url for file. This is no different, by the way, when I upload and then download games we made in Memorize. However, Memorize will load the downloaded game. Thanks. Gerald Hi, I checked the apache config and added the mime type for the .pr files. I downloaded the file on my Mac and it got the correct mime type and offered to open the project in Squeak. I'm not sure if the filename doesn't play a role on the Mac. I tried on soas-strawberry and XO-802 and it did not open etoys from the journal. Maybe etoys is looking for a different mime-type than x-application/squeak-project? Try application/x-squeak-project not x-application/... It used to work on 802. And it does work in F11_XO1.5/Sugar 0.84 - I just tried. Just go to Squeakland.org and click the project thumbnail next to Jeopardy 3point0 which is the current project of the week. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sharing EToys projects
On 07.12.2009, at 22:08, Dave Bauer wrote: On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 4:04 PM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 07.12.2009, at 21:54, Dave Bauer wrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com wrote: Tomeu, There is no mime type that I can see. The Journal entry simply says File filename.pr from url for file. This is no different, by the way, when I upload and then download games we made in Memorize. However, Memorize will load the downloaded game. Thanks. Gerald Hi, I checked the apache config and added the mime type for the .pr files. I downloaded the file on my Mac and it got the correct mime type and offered to open the project in Squeak. I'm not sure if the filename doesn't play a role on the Mac. I tried on soas-strawberry and XO-802 and it did not open etoys from the journal. Maybe etoys is looking for a different mime-type than x-application/squeak-project? Try application/x-squeak-project not x-application/... It used to work on 802. And it does work in F11_XO1.5/Sugar 0.84 - I just tried. Just go to Squeakland.org and click the project thumbnail next to Jeopardy 3point0 which is the current project of the week. Ok, good news! That opens in the etoys plugin in my browser so I will try to change the mime type and test again. Thanks Dave Ah well, the plugin embedding code (on Mac/Win/non-sugar Linux) provides its own mime type, so this does not really mean it will work in Sugar, where you do not have (nor need) the plugin. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar
On 15.12.2009, at 15:09, Daniel Drake wrote: I believe there are still various well-known 0.86 regressions (over 0.84). For example, Record not working. These regressions are going to be a huge headache to anyone who tries to upgrade, perhaps you could squash a few of those. Speaking of upgrade headaches, the most significant UI change in 0.84 is resume-by-default, which combined with the still not implemented versioning is possibly unhealthy in deployments. I can see many Journal entries overwritten for good. Has there been any experience with kids used to the 0.82 way who switched to a later Sugar version? And if needed, would it be easy for deployments to revert to not resuming by default? - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sharing work between XOs/SOAS devices
On 15.12.2009, at 18:30, Gerald Ardito wrote: Hello all. As our 5th graders are doing more and more work with their XOs, their being able to turn in and share their work products (as opposed to collaborating with others) is becoming more and more important. My temporary solution is having them upload their work (along with reflections, if desired) to Moodle, which I can do because we have an XS implementation. However, this means that if a student has created a Memorize vocabulary game that s/he want to share s/he has to: 1. Create the game. 2. Save it to the Journal 3. Go to Browse 4. Navigate to Moodle 5. Find the right course/right assignment within the course 6. Upload game. S/he pretty much has to do the same thing to download and then play other games. This is certainly workable, but dramatically slows down the momentum of creating games and wanting others to play them. So, I am asking to create/offering to help create an Activity that allows users to share work products easily. I know that Bert was working on something called Distribute, which may be a starting place. It seems to share Journal objects, which seems right. That is Ben's activity, not mine: 2009/10/28 Benjamin M. Schwartz bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu: Bert Freudenberg wrote: The Distribute activity would be your best bet I guess. Where is it? http://dev.laptop.org/~bemasc/Distribute-1.xo Distribute is the barest prototype of a sharing activity, designed purely as a proof of concept. It is unmaintained, has essentially no user interface, and is not available in any language other than English. The code is a simplified derivative of the hackish HTTP-based sharing system from Read. Any attempts to revive it are welcome. This is the first time I've ever heard of anyone even attempting to use it. --Ben We got reports that it does indeed work, though I'm not aware of anyone starting to improve it. - Bert - I am happy to work with developers on this. I could create requirements, if need be. Just say the word. I look forward to what comes next. Thanks and best, Gerald ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] EToys Saving Problem
On 15.01.2010, at 15:46, Gerald Ardito wrote: Bert, Thanks for this. I was able to find some lost EToys projects using your suggestion. I could use some help using copy-to-journal. I am getting an error about mimetype. What should I use? Thanks. Gerald For Etoys projects use application/x-squeak-project. Yes, it's maddening that copy-to-journal forces you to type that, when a simple call to gvfs-info (or its pythonesk incantation) would guess correctly most of the time (*). - Bert - (*) [o...@xo-0c-f3-0c ~]$ gvfs-info -a standard::content-type /usr/share/etoys/*.pr | tail -1 | sed 's/.* //' application/x-squeak-project ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Olpc-Haiti] Need in Haiti: inexpensive portable projectors forOLPC/XO classrooms
On 03.02.2010, at 11:51, C. Scott Ananian wrote: I also wonder if http://www.amazon.com/Porta-Trace-Mini-Sketch-5x-Opaque-Projector/dp/B000A3E2T2 might work, if just placed on an XO screen. There might still be heat issues, but it's cheap enough that an experiment might be warranted. --scott That's a cute idea! Needs to be larger though - the XO's screen is 6.0x4.5 inches, and this one only sees 3.5x3.5. The middle one (5x5) is still to small, the big one (7x7) would fit but is already close to the XO's price itself. Worth a try though ... http://www.gagneinc.com/PortaTraceTrace-master.html - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [etoys-dev] TED - Alan Kay - Example(8:44)
On 22.02.2010, at 08:50, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: Here is an SVG of the simplest proof of the Pythagorean theorem I know, by dissection of a large square into five pieces that fit together into two smaller squares side by side. Thanks Edward I did not notice that no rotations were required (silly me) Implemented in Turtle Art, not so hard. http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2010/02/turtle-pythagoras.html That layout doesn't really convey the idea of the proof to me. This does: inline: 300px-Pythagorean_proof_(1).svg.png (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [POLL] Non Sugar Platform activities in Activity Library
On 01.03.2010, at 10:07, Aleksey Lim wrote: Should sugar be closed education environment with activities created(in python) only for sugar or sugar provides programming languages agnostic services (Journal, Collab oriented features) that could be used by *existed* education applications (via tools like dbus etc.). Is there really any doubt that Sugar should be an open platform? - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Test developed activity for XO Laptop.
On 09.03.2010, at 00:09, Parichay Parivesh wrote: Hello, I am developing an activity for XO laptop. Probably It is going to developed around 15 or 16 March 2010. I wanted to test that activity on XO laptop. Can any one tell me how can I do that. Another thing I have developed that activity in Etoy, So how can I export in the format suitable for XO laptop (Sugar). Do you mean you made a project in Etoys? And now you want to build a Sugar activity from that? Or what exactly do you have now? - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Test developed activity for XO Laptop.
It sounds like you did not even start using Etoys? That would be ... ambitious. Also, please remember to reply all so the other list members can read what you write. - Bert - On 09.03.2010, at 00:55, Parichay Parivesh wrote: Hello Bert, As I mention that I am about to finish my design section of the game and after that I am going to use Etoy for scripting. I will let you know when I finish with my scripting. By any changed have worked on Etoy then can you suggest some tutorial for that. I don't have XO laptop with me to test on it. but thanks for quick reply and valuable suggestion. On 8 March 2010 23:37, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: In Etoys you normally save what you did as a project file, the filename will look like mygame.pr. Is that what you mean? If yes, then this can be loaded into Etoys on the XO, too. You can copy it onto a USB memory stick and try on your XO. Please report back if this works. Building an XO bundle from an Etoys project is possible too, but first I need to understand what you actually did. - Bert - On 09.03.2010, at 00:25, Parichay Parivesh wrote: Hello Bert, I am developing an educative game for XO laptop. For developing that game I used a software called as Etoy. Now I wanted to export that game in certain format that It can run on XO laptop, like other activity. I hope Now I am making some sense to you. I am hoping that the game will be finished by 16th March 2010. I am almost finish off my designing part and the I am going to do scripting part. Thanks Kind Regards Parichay Parivesh On 8 March 2010 23:12, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 09.03.2010, at 00:09, Parichay Parivesh wrote: Hello, I am developing an activity for XO laptop. Probably It is going to developed around 15 or 16 March 2010. I wanted to test that activity on XO laptop. Can any one tell me how can I do that. Another thing I have developed that activity in Etoy, So how can I export in the format suitable for XO laptop (Sugar). Do you mean you made a project in Etoys? And now you want to build a Sugar activity from that? Or what exactly do you have now? - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On 13.03.2010, at 11:56, Bernie Innocenti wrote: I've spent three days in Caacupè, observing how the new F11-XO1 build is doing among our young user base. It's a great success, but for the wrong reason: http://codewiz.org/wiki/blog/2010/03#mon-mar-8--children-want-sugar-084-for-the-wrong-reasons Very valid observation. My kids change their desktop wallpaper about every week. So +1 to look customization. E.g., why not allow to change the gray frame color? In Etoys you can at least change the toolbar color (not permanently though, I should fix that). Even if it enrages our latte-drinking black-wearing designer friends ;) they're kids after all ... - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Coming to Paraguay?
Indeed I'm working on adding Journal support to Scratch, almost done in fact. But I can't say when John is going to make a release with that. I'm not working on sound or other issues, but Derek did something in that direction IIRC. Btw you can read about ongoing development at https://launchpad.net/~scratch - Bert - On 15.03.2010, at 19:32, Claudia Urrea wrote: Hi Bernie, Thanks for your email. I am waiting on the visa... but I shouldn't have any problems (I am still waiting for Cecilia to send a letter to me). I don't have the agenda yet, I am planning to work with the team of Formadores. Yes. Bert is working on the new version of Scratch (hired by OLPC). I think it is going to be ready very soon! See you soon! Claudia On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: Continuing our earlier irc conversation on iaep@: bernie I need an updated version of Scratch for the XO... the current version has issues with sound ClaudiaU_ thanks for the report! You are in Paraguay? Indeed! I'll be working on field until August to bridge Sugar Labs with one of the best deployments out there. It's happening bidirectionally: 1) learn about real-world issues with our software and relay such information directly to the Sugar developers and community. 2) at the same time, deliver the latest and greatest of our software in the hands of local children. More than just a bridge, I'm hoping to build a self-reinforcing feedback loop, the kind of thing which powers successful free software projects. ClaudiaU_ bernie: I don't have a public version of Scratch yet, but I am hoping soon... Bern is working on it! You mean Bert? Or me? Or someone I don't know? Some kids here taught themselves Scratch and are doing great things with it: http://codewiz.org/wiki/blog/2010/03#fri-mar-12--interview-with-los-scratcheros It's incredible if you consider to children in Caacupè did not have easy access to computers and fancy electronic gadgets. Most children and teachers have been using computers for the first time less than one year ago. So I think we're just starting to... scratching the surface. (ok, please forgive me for this silly pun). ClaudiaU_ Bernie: I am coming to Paraguay next week let me know if you are there This is great news. Today Cecilia told me you'll be here on the 22nd. What's your schedule like for the week? Anything you would like to work on together? -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: [Edu-sig] Computer Science For Kids Book Announcement
Looks nice :) - Bert - Begin forwarded message: From: Andre Lessa an...@lessaworld.com Date: 19. März 2010 05:28:54 MEZ To: edu-...@python.org Subject: [Edu-sig] Computer Science For Kids Book Announcement Hey Python Community, I just self published this brand new book and I'm making its PDF available for (free) download on my web site. My goal is to explain some very basic fundamentals of computer science to kids who are starting to learn about computers at school and/or at home. For the tiny hints of programming, I referenced Python. If you (or a kid you know) ends up having access to this book, please send your feedback (suggestions/corrections) directly to me so I can start thinking about the next edition and how I can make it even cooler for kids. Thanks! Andre Lessa You can download the entire book here (no registration required). Computer Science For Kids http://www.LessaWorld.com/kids/ ___ Edu-sig mailing list edu-...@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: [Edu-sig] Computer Science For Kids Book Announcement
On 19.03.2010, at 13:19, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 5:36 AM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: Looks nice :) Pretty good. A few places it could be improved. For example, in his compression example, Page 28, he gets confused about bits and bytes. And his page on Open Source is a bit off the mark IMHO. Still, it may appeal to some. I'd be curious to get some teacher reactions. -walter Given that he posted to edu-sig he might be open to suggestions ... - Bert - Begin forwarded message: From: Andre Lessa an...@lessaworld.com Date: 19. März 2010 05:28:54 MEZ To: edu-...@python.org Subject: [Edu-sig] Computer Science For Kids Book Announcement Hey Python Community, I just self published this brand new book and I'm making its PDF available for (free) download on my web site. My goal is to explain some very basic fundamentals of computer science to kids who are starting to learn about computers at school and/or at home. For the tiny hints of programming, I referenced Python. If you (or a kid you know) ends up having access to this book, please send your feedback (suggestions/corrections) directly to me so I can start thinking about the next edition and how I can make it even cooler for kids. Thanks! Andre Lessa You can download the entire book here (no registration required). Computer Science For Kids http://www.LessaWorld.com/kids/ ___ Edu-sig mailing list edu-...@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- 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] urgent E toy!!!!!!!!!!!
Also see http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-529 - Bert - On 22.03.2010, at 14:08, Steve Thomas wrote: To get a flap hit CTRLW (on Macintosh CMDW). This will bring up the World menu. Then click on flaps... which will display the flaps menu. Then click on make a new flap You can now drag text (and any other objects) onto the flap. Stephen On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Everything in Etoys is made from a single kind of basic object. They can all be attached (embedded) in any other object. First, make a flap, then open it by clicking on the tab, and simply drag a text object into the flap and drop it. Cheers, Alan From: Parichay Parivesh parivesh.paric...@googlemail.com To: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Sent: Mon, March 22, 2010 4:27:34 AM Subject: [IAEP] urgent E toy!!! hello Can any one giude how write text in flap connector in Etoy . Its very very urgent ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Gravity for Beginners...
On 28.03.2010, at 06:48, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 23:11, Yamandu Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: How much lighter is a person in La Paz, Bolivia, than at sea level? This actually was asked by a kid when I was there last time. For practical purposes let's assume La Paz is 3.800 m over sea level Fascinating question. The simplest answer is that weight is inversely proportional to distance from the center, which we can approximate as 40,000 km/pi, or 12,742 km on average. This would give us a difference of roughly one part in 5,000 in weight for a difference of 4 parts in 10,000 in height. However, the distance between surface and center is actually 43 km greater at the equator than at the pole, so we have to do some much finer calculations to locate sea level at he latitude of La Paz. Then we have to decide whether to ask what the weights would be on a stationary Earth, or whether we will take rotation into account, resulting in apparent decreases in centripetal forces. If we wanted to be really finicky, we could take relativity into account also. ^_^ Indeed. My 10 year old son came home recently with the claim that people on mountains live longer. We had some fun introducing relativity, but didn't actually bother to calculate what fraction of a second this would amount to over a lifetime ;) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Helping kids develop mobile applications?
On 31.03.2010, at 04:26, Cherry Withers wrote: Someone already put Squeak on an iPhone (iPod Touch more accurately): http://news.squeak.org/2008/06/11/squeak-on-the-iphone/ And the same someone made a player for Scratch projects: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scratch/id358266270 However, you cannot edit projects on the phone. The authoring UI would have to be completely redesigned. For serious work it's just too small, you at least need a screen size like the XO has. Not too far fetched to get Etoys on iPhone soon enough. :-) It would be no problem to get Etoys running. However, just playing back stuff is not in the spirit of Etoys. Our mantra is Authoring is Always On. E.g. even when you view an Etoys project in a web browser, you have all the authoring tools available. Contrast this with Scratch, projects you view on the web cannot be edited directly in the browser, you need to download them and open in the full Scratch application. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] maintenance
On 30.04.2010, at 12:38, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Hi, follows a plan about how to improve the situation regarding maintenance of our software modules. If you care about it, please reply even if only to say so, or even better, comment on it and suggest improvements. I will assume that lack of replies mean people don't care about it and will stop caring about it myself. I do care. We face a similar problem for Etoys, and there are even less Etoys developers than Sugar developers. However, there are many more Squeak developers than Etoys developers (*), so our strategy is to make it as simple to contribute as possible, and also raise the visibility of Etoys in the larger Squeak community. We'll see how that plays out :) - Bert - (*) Etoys is implemented in Squeak, which is a programming environment invented specifically to create authoring tools for children of all ages, but nowadays is used for all sorts of development, ranging from mobile devices to web services. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Soliciting SoaS v.4 Codename Colour Suggestions
Gooseberry. Green. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooseberry Tasty, funny name, what more do we want? ;) - Bert - On 03.06.2010, at 20:31, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: We'd like to kick off the process for the upcoming Sugar on a Stick v.4 already, while gearing up for the SoaS PR at LinuxTag, too. And so we're looking forward to your ideas and suggestions on the codename and colour selections for the next release iteration. These will be discussed at the next meeting, which is scheduled to take place on Monday, June 7 on 1900 UTC in #sugar-meeting. Thanks, --Sebastian ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] Soliciting SoaS v.4 Codename Colour Suggestions
Ah. Had forgotten about that theme. And Mirabelle isn't an ice cream I recognize either ;) - Bert - On 04.06.2010, at 11:12, Peter Robinson wrote: I believe the themeing for SoaS is Icecream and not berries. I vote for vanilla or Cookies Cream :-P Peter On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: Gooseberry. Green. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooseberry Tasty, funny name, what more do we want? ;) - Bert - On 03.06.2010, at 20:31, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: We'd like to kick off the process for the upcoming Sugar on a Stick v.4 already, while gearing up for the SoaS PR at LinuxTag, too. And so we're looking forward to your ideas and suggestions on the codename and colour selections for the next release iteration. These will be discussed at the next meeting, which is scheduled to take place on Monday, June 7 on 1900 UTC in #sugar-meeting. Thanks, --Sebastian ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ Marketing mailing list market...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3
IAEP is not a catch all. It's hard to delineate exactly what's appropriate and what's not, but the exchange below clearly belongs on the developer list. Everyone who is interested in that kind of detail and able to follow the discussion is certainly subscribed to that other list. So as soon as a topic swings too much into technobabble it should be taken off IAEP. IMHO. Thanks to Ian for speaking up. Self-moderation works :) - Bert - On 09.06.2010, at 00:56, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: Ian Do you think that the solution is to create a new and more narrow list which meets the needs of deployers and teachers or to narrow the scope of IAEP and moderate it to keep it within scope? My understanding if IAEP is thats its a catch all, if you only follow one list, its the one to follow to keep across all issues. I cannot recall a moderator stopping a thread. Does it need to be moderated to keep it within A discussion list for Sugar and the learning theories that it espouses? The issues with starting a more aggressively moderated deployers and teachers list is that its one more list to monitor and that it might never get critical mass. Tony Guys, I have been an avid follower of IAEP for over a year now. I was, and still am, very attracted to the theme of the list serve. But I find increasingly, I delete 90% of the emails as they hold no interest to me as a regional coordinator of OLPC projects in the Pacific Islands. I am sorry, but this stream of ARM processors and SCIM/M17N/IBus/etc holds no interest to me and I really can't see how it adds value to the IAEP theme. I find the list serve has been taken over by technical developers and it is no longer helpful in delivering educational information to me. I guess I must be having a bad morning, but this time I just had to make a comment. Ian Thomson PacRICS and OLPC Coordinator SPC Phone +687 26 01 44 -Original Message- From: iaep-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:iaep-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Sayamindu Dasgupta Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 4:35 AM To: Peter Robinson Cc: Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero; marketing; b...@alum.mit.edu; iaep Subject: Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3 On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta sayami...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 7:52 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi, Linux has been running well on ARM for a long long time. Yeah. In specific, today I got Sugar running on the ARM SoC we'll be using for XO-1.75 and XO-3, and it didn't require any porting at all. It would have happened yesterday, but I had to work out how to get past the Sugar intro/login screen without a keyboard. :-) That's cool! A couple of questions What's the plan for the boot loader, is it planned to use OF still and port it to the ARM platform or is it planned to use one of the more mainline ARM bootloaders such as uboot or the like. Also what's the plan with the virtual keyboard support in sugar. It might be worth looking at the MeeGo/Moblin based VKB stuff as a basis. Its skinnable and supported various inputs via scim and integrates with that. Let me know if you need more info as I've been packaging some of this up in Fedora as part of my work with the aforementioned UIs in Fedora. At one point I had tried to evaluate the possible virtual/on-screen keyboards that could be used for Sugar, and at that time it looked like each used their own keyboard layout data format. Something which leverages existing mechanisms like SCIM/M17N/IBus/etc would certainly be an improvement. Could you point me to the source code repo of VKB - I would love to take a look. I'm not sure if this is the the best current upstream because of the changes in the Moblin/MeeGo side of things but the git here is relatively recent fvkbd is the actual virtual keyboard. This is also in Fedora. http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/fvkbd/ scim-panel-vkb-gtk is the scim overlay stuff. It will be in Fedora 14 and likely pushed back to F-12/F13. http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/scim-panel-vkb-gtk/ Thanks for the links. This also seems to use its own data format¹ for defining the keyboards, but it looks like it is much more mature/flexible than the other options I have seen so far. FWIW, I had written a tool² which could parse XKB layout definitions (symbol files) and produce the corresponding SCIM layouts, and I have used it to generate OFW keytables as well³. I think that this tool (with some modifications) will be able to migrate our existing keyboard layouts to the format required by fvkbd. Thanks, Sayamindu [1] http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/fvkbd/tree/layout [2]
Re: [IAEP] Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers
On 12.06.2010, at 20:10, Kevin Cole wrote: Regarding the recent discussion of Sugar on an iPhone and Apple's position on interpreted languages: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qWtSOhKr4To/Apple-Eases-Restrictions-On-iPhone-Developers WrongSizeGlass writes MacRumors has a story on a report by Apple Outsider's Matt Drance that Apple is easing their restrictions on interpreted code used in iPhone development, a change which allows game developers in particular to continue to use interpreted languages such as Lua in their App Store applications. The change comes alongside Apple's further modifications of its iOS developer terms that again allow for limited analytics data collection to aid advertisers and developers, but appear to shut out non-independent companies such as Google's AdMob from receiving the data. It's not enough of an 'about face' to let Adobe or Google back in the picture but they've backpedaled enough to let the little guys squeeze through. Read more of this story at Slashdot\ The educational use of interpreted languages is at least part of Apple's revised terms. See forwarded message below - allowing applications like Squeak/Etoys and Scratch is of concern to Apple. John is the developer of the Squeak Virtual Machine for the iPhone/iPad, which is used by both the Scratch and Etoys ports. - Bert - Begin forwarded message: From: John M McIntosh john...@smalltalkconsulting.com Date: 11. Juni 2010 07:43:05 MESZ To: lengli...@cox.net Cc: ESUG Mailing list esug-l...@lists.esug.org, pharo-proj...@lists.gforge.inria.fr Development pharo-proj...@lists.gforge.inria.fr, The general-purpose Squeak developers list squeak-...@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Re: [squeak-dev] Re: Talking to Steve Jobs about Scratch. Reply-To: john...@smalltalkconsulting.com, The general-purpose Squeak developers list squeak-...@lists.squeakfoundation.org Well I was hoping to have a few more days to settle things. The Smalltalk community should take a deep bow and thank Alan Kay for spending many hours talking to the highest level of people at Apple about the importance of the iPad as a platform to teach computational theory to people of all ages. So how does this all sort out? Well I don't know, nothing has officially changed, yet... But I'm at WWDC this week, I did talk to the manager of the App Store (they were expecting me) and I do have an appointment with Apple next week to discuss the Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing Once that happens I will let everyone know the outcome, Apple is working what the approval process is, and I think the Smalltalk Scratch community will be the first players in the door for Apple's embracing of interpreted languages for educational purposes on the iPad. I must publicly thank the Smalltalk and Scratch communities for being patient and polite in waiting for the issue to resolve itself, and true thanks should be directed to Alan for his behind the scenes efforts in ensuring the Computer Science community has equal footing with the language arts music departments for apps on the iPad. I caution everyone that we're not there yet, but let's see what happens next week, so don't open the champaign bottles yet. -- === John M. McIntosh john...@smalltalkconsulting.com Twitter: squeaker68882 Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com === ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
