===Sugar Digest===
1. Greg Morris from Nexcopy, the company that donated one of their USB
Duplicator to Sugar Labs, has been busy with another generous effort.
Check out http://recycleusb.com, a website dedicated on turning used
flash drives into portable learning devices for children, schools and
education institutions. They are featuring Sugar On A Stick and
offer to load Sugar onto recycled USB flash drives and sending them to
Sugar Labs for global deployment.
So, don't throw away those old flash drives: donate them!
2. It was great to hear from Bill Kerr, who has some of his students
trialling Sugar on a Stick. Check out Bill's blog
[http://xo-whs2009.blogspot.com/] (which also appears in our Planet)
and read up on his students impressions of Sugar, which are linked
from the sidebar.
3. I forget how exhausting teaching can be, even part time. I've been
teaching five Sugar classes per week this summer: two for second
graders, one for third graders, and one for middle-school youth. The
reports from the Gardner School [[Gardner_Pilot_Academy#Class_notes]]
describe much of what I have been doing. The demands of the children
being what they are, I keep biting off more and more as the summer has
progressed. (One of the dangers of putting developers and teachers in
the same room.) Lately, I have been exploring how the children might
use Turtle Art to create some geography games similar to Conozco
Uruguay. Without too much effort, I managed to create a simple
framework that I used to sketch out a few games (See
http://www.dailymotion.com/user/sugarlabs/video/x9yrxj_continent-game_tech
and http://www.dailymotion.com/user/sugarlabs/video/x9xz9o_stategame_tech.)
This morning, I made
http://www.dailymotion.com/user/sugarlabs/video/x9zy4v_where-is-the-gardner-schooly_tech,
a game specific to the Gardner School, leveraging the work they had
been doing with maps and pictures of their neighborhood. We played all
the games as a group—the kids were animated and engaged. Then I shared
the Gardner Game with their Sugar neighborhood and asked them to
launch it.
Here is where the trouble began. First of all, the version of Turtle
Art I used to build the game is newer than the version they had
installed on their machines. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, but
I had used a block that they didn't have, so the sharing halted part
way through. The good news is that Sebastian Dziallias pushed a change
for Sugar on a Stick to contain all activities packaged as XO files,
meaning that all activities can update. (Presently, it is non-trivial
to update activities that had been distributed as RPM.) The bad news
is, Turtle Art, being part of Fructose, had been distributed as RPM on
the Gardner School sticks. So I will have to update them by hand.
But had sharing worked, I still would have run into some problems,
since once, shared, always shared. I discussed the problem with Ben
Schwartz in IRC:
:walterbender bemasc: here is my use scenario: the current sharing
mechanism with its automatic resume doesn't work...
:walterbender I designed a game template for the kids to use in Turtle Art.
:walterbender I then shared my construction with them.
:walterbender So far so good.
:walterbender (of course, I had a version mismatch that caused the
sharing to fail part way through, which I have subsequently fixed.)
:walterbender but the problem is, once shared, always shared.
:walterbender I want the kids to each modify the template their own
way, not as a group.
:walterbender and then share their individual results with the group
at check points. So the feature is that sharing is punctuated. But
also involves explicit forking. the merge is perhaps the least
important.
:walterbender but the current model is always merging all the time...
:walterbender (I suppose I could make TA share in only one
direction, using the current model).
:walterbender but then how would a kid share her cool innovation?
:bemasc walterbender: hmm. Why not use object transfer?
:bemasc walterbender: as I've suggested with my mockups, we could
have a system in which every time a user launches a previously shared
activity, they have the option to work privately.
:bemasc I haven't implemented this, mostly because I'm not much a
GUI programmer, but it's a possibility.
:walterbender bemasc: Does object transfer work for objects other than text?
:bemasc walterbender: I mean the Journal-based object transfer. You
can send any journal item to anyone in 0.84.
:bemasc The problem in 0.84 is that this is push only, so you have
to click N times to send it to N people.
:walterbender bemasc: I hadn't tried it lately, but I wasn't able to
get to work for TA objects.
:bemasc Also, I think you have to make them all friends first.
:bemasc walterbender: well, that's certainly mysterious.
:walterbender bemasc: I'll try again.
:walterbender bemasc: but I still like the idea of doing this
through the collaboration model so that they results and be
shared/merged more directly...
:bemasc
