+
+**Figure: Data from a DSPE-ANEP survey of students in Montevideo before and after the deployment of Sugar**
+
+Sugar was designed so that new uses emerging from the community could easily be incorporated, thus Sugar could be augmented and amplified by its community and the end users. We encouraged our end users to make contributions to the software itself. This was in part out of necessity: we were a small team with limited resources and we had no direct access to local curricula, needs, or problems. But our ulterior motive was to engage our users in development as a vehicle for their own learning.
+
+One of the first examples of end-user contributions took place in Abuja, Nigeria, site of the first OLPC pilot project. While teachers and students took to Sugar quickly, they did confront some problems. The most notable of these was that the word-processor application, Write, did not have a spelling dictionary in Igbo, the dialect used in this particular classroom (and one of the more than three-hundred languages currently spoken in Nigeria). From a conventional software-development standpoint, solving this problem (300 times) would be prohibitively expensive. But for children in Abuja, equipped with Sugar, the solution was simple: confronted with the problem of lacking a dictionary, they made their own Igbo dictionary. The did not look for others to do the work for them. The took on the responsibility themselves. The Free/Libre Software ethic built into Sugar enabled local control and innovation.
+
+John Gilmore heard the about our aspiration to reach out to our end users—children—at the 2008 Libreplanet conference. He asked, “how many patches have you received from kids?” At the time, the answer to his question was zero. But over the past nine years, the situation has changed dramatically. By 2015, 50% of the patches in our new releases were coming from children (See Table); our release manager in 2015–16 (Sugar v0.108) was Sam Parkinson, a fifteen-year-old from Australia; our current release manager (Sugar v0.110) is Ignacio Rodríguez, an eighteen-year-old from Uruguay who began hanging out on our IRC channel at age ten and contributing code at age twelve.
+
+| Release number (date) | Total Commits | Youth Commits | Release note URL |
+|-------------------------|---------------|---------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
+| 0.102 (July 2014) | 424 | 108 | [View Notes](https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.102/Notes) |
+| 0.104 (February 2015) | 249 | 127 | [View Notes](https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.104/Notes) |
+
+**Table 1: Sugar commits by youth contributors**
+
+When the now former president of Uruguay, José Mujica, learned that a twelve-year-old from a small town east of Montevideo had programmed six entirely new Sugar activities for the XO, he smiled and said triumphantly: “Now we have hackers.” In his eyes, this one child’s ability to contribute to the global Sugar development community was a leading indicator of change and development in his country.
+
+None of this happened on its own. End-user contributions are not simply an artifact of Sugar been Free/Libre Software. Open-source Software gives you access to the code and that Free/Libre Software gives you a license to make changes. But without some level of support, very few people will have the means to exercise the rights granted to them under the license. For this reason, we built scaffolding into Sugar to directly support making changes and extensions to Sugar applications and Sugar itself.
+
+Sugar has no black boxes: the learner sees what the software does and how it does it. Sugar is written in Python and comes with all of the tools necessary to modify Sugar applications and Sugar itself. We chose Python as our development language because of its transparency and clarity. It is a very approachable language for inexperienced programmers. With just one keystroke or mouse click, the Sugar “view source” feature allows the user to look at any program they are running. A second mouse click results in a copy of the application being saved to the Sugar Applications directory, where it is immediately available for modification. (We use a “copy on write” scheme in order to reduce the risk of breaking critical tools. If there is no penalty for breaking code, there is better risk-reward ratio for exploring and modifying code.) The premise is that taking something apart and reassembling it in different ways is a key to understanding it.
+
+Not every creative use of Sugar involves programming. Rosamel Norma Ramírez Méndez is a teacher from a school in Durazno, a farming region about two-hours drive north from Montevideo, Uruguay. Ramírez had her lessons for the week prepared when, first thing Monday morning, one of her students walked into her classroom holding a loofa. The child asked Ramírez, “teacher, what is this?” Rather than answering the question, Ramírez seized the opportunity to engage her class in an authentic learning experience. She discarded her lesson plans for the week. Instead, on Monday the children figured out what they had found; on Tuesday they determined that they could grow it in their community; on Wednesday they investigated whether or not they should grow it in their community; on Thursday they prepared a presentation to give to their farmer parents on Friday about why they should grow this potential cash crop. Not every teacher has the insight into learning demonstrated by Ramírez. And not every teacher has the courage to discard their lesson plans in order to capture a learning opportunity, But given an extraordinary teacher, she was able to mentor her students as they used Sugar as a tool for problem-solving. Ramírez encouraged her students to become active in their learning, which means that they engaged in doing, making, problem-solving, and reflection.
+
+_**“Teachers can learn (and contribute) too.” – Walter Bender**_
+
+Sometimes teachers have been directly involved in Sugar software development. Sugar has an abacus application to help children explore whole-number arithmetic and the concept base (the activity allows the user to switch between various base representations of whole numbers). It also lets children design their own abacus. Teachers in Caacupé, Paraguay, were searching for a way to help their students with the concept of fractions. After playing with the Sugar abacus activity, they conceived and created—with the help of the Sugar developer community—a new abacus that lets children add and subtract fractions (See Figure). Sugar didn't just enable the teachers to invent, it encouraged them to invent.
+
+
+
+**Figure: The Caacupé Abacus. The white beads represent whole numbers. The black beads represent fractions.**
+
+Guzmán Trinidad, a high-school physics teacher from Montevideo, Uruguay and Tony Forster, a retired mechanical engineer from Melbourne, Australia collaborated on a collection of physics experiments that could be conducted with a pair of alligator clips and a small collection of Sugar applications. In the process of developing their experiments, they maintained regular communication with the developers, submitting bug reports, documentation, feature requests, and the occasional patch. Other examples of teacher and community-based contributions include Proyecto Butiá, a robotics and sensor platform build on top of Sugar (and GNOME) at Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Uruguay. Butiá inspired numerous other robotics platforms, e.g., RoDI (Robot Didáctico Inalámbrico) developed in Paraguay, as well as a wealth of projects aligned with the pedagogy of Constructionism. In the spirit of Sugar, these hardware projects were all designed to be “open”: schematics and firmware were made available under Free/Libre licenses.
+
+In 2012, we were part of a team running a week-long Sugar workshop for more than 60 teachers who had traveled to Chachapoyas, the regional capital of the Amazonas region of Peru. During the day we spend time reviewing the various Sugar activities and discussing strategies for using Sugar in the classroom. In the evenings, we gave a series of optional workshops on specialized topics. One evening, mid-week, the topic was fixing bugs in Sugar. It was not expected that many teachers would attend—in part because we were competing with an annual festival and in part because their background in programming was minimal. But almost everyone showed up. In the workshop, we walked through the process of fixing a bug in the Sugar Mind Map activity and used git to push a patch upstream. Teachers, especially rural teachers, have a hunger for knowledge about the tools that they use. This is in part due to intellectual curiosity and in part due to necessity: no one is going to make a service call to Amazonas. As purveyors of educational technology we have both a pedagogical and moral obligation to provide the means by which our users can maintain (and modify) our products. Enabling those closest to the learners is in the interest of everyone invested in educational technology as it both ensures viability of the product and it is a valuable source of new ideas and initiatives.
+
+References
+----------
+
+* * *
+
+1. Ceibal Jam (2009). Convenio marco entre la Asociación Civil Ceibal Jam y la Universidad de la República.
+2. DSPE-ANEP (2011). Informe de evaluación del Plan Ceibal 2010. Administración Nacional de Educación Pública Dirección Sectorial de Planificación Educativa Área de Evaluación del Plan Ceibal.
diff --git a/_posts/2024-12-25-Reflections-as-Parents-and-Teachers-Sugar-at-home-and-in-their-classroom.md b/_posts/2024-12-25-Reflections-as-Parents-and-Teachers-Sugar-at-home-and-in-their-classroom.md
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@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+---
+layout: story
+title: "Reflections as Parents and Teachers Sugar at home and in their classroom"
+date: 2024-12-25
+author: "Devin Ulibarri"
+categories: stories
+---
+
+Reflections as a parent and teacher: Sugar at home and in the classroom
+=======================================================================
+
+As the year comes to a close, I wanted to take some time to reflect upon how I’ve used Sugar both in the classroom and at home. I have a few hopes in mind as I share my experience engaging with Sugar both as a teacher and a parent. One hope is that it will show a window into some of the more grounded work Sugar Labs has done this year.
+
+Much of the most recent testimony that we’ve shared from the [Sugar Labs community](/@sugarlabs) has been centered around software development. While the success of students creating software is certainly important, the purpose of such progress is grounded in helping teachers teach and to help learners learn. Another hope is that the following vignettes will dispel doubts around the efficacy of the Sugar Learning Platform as an effective tool for education, which I’ve heard from a few folks during conversations throughout [my first year as Sugar Labs’s executive director](https://www.sugarlabs.org/press/2024/05/08/Sugar-Labs-announces-nonprofit-status-new-executive-director/). This article will address those doubts directly. My third hope is that my experiences will inspire others, whether parents or teachers (or both), to try Sugar themselves.
+
+The first few years as a parent
+===============================
+
+My son Kai was born in 2017, but it was about three years before his birth that I became involved in Sugar Labs. It’s a story that I’ve told in more depth before, but I became interested in Sugar Labs because of their unique approach to education. At the time, I was doing research on the _implications of software-freedom-in-education_, which led me to conclude that the freedoms granted to users in free/libre/open (FLO) source software have [profound positive implications for education](https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Education-needs-free-software.pdf). I attended a talk given by Sugar Labs founder Walter Bender, and we soon began working together to integrate music into [Turtle Blocks](http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4027), in what is now known as [Music Blocks visual programming language](https://www.sugarlabs.org/music-blocks/). It was also around this time in 2014 that I received a One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop from Walter that I used to familiarize myself with the Sugar Learning Platform.
+
+Although I had shown Kai a few things on the OLPC when he was a toddler, such as creating a paint program for him in the Turtle Blocks Activity, it wasn’t until he was about four years old that he really took to it. His first, most sustained, interest in the computer came when he was learning to read by himself. I remember that his desire to read was basically insatiable. In fact, he had memorized some sections of the graphic novel series _Dog Man_ by [Dav Pilkey](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dav_Pilkey), which I had read to him multiple times because he loved it so much. At four years old, Kai had memorized a lot of the story, but he wasn’t yet reading himself; he was still dependent on others to read for him. It was at this point that he found the [Speak Activity](http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4038) on his OLPC, and this is when he had a real breakthrough with reading.
+
+
+
+Kai, with his OLPC, running the Speak Activity on the Sugar Learning Platform.
+
+The basic way that the Speak Activity works is by taking typed input from a user and speaking it back to them when they press return. I remember Kai walking around the house, finding words on various things around the house, typing those words into the computer, and listening to the result. It was in this way that he memorized the spelling of a few words, and, soon enough, he was creating sentences and telling the computer to speak those words back to him (or to me). It was also around this time that we went on a long family road trip, where Kai sat in the back seat typing various words and sentences and learning more and more about language.
+
+
+
+Kai, helping one of my students get up and running in Sugar for her first time.
+
+Of course, I kept reading books to him, which is still invaluable to a child’s development, but I am confident that the Speak Activity helped Kai become a more independent reader. The following year, Kai entered Kindergarten, where he learned phonics and he’s been a solid reader ever since. He’s now in second grade, and he often carries a few books around with him every day, everywhere he goes.
+
+
+
+Students in a Music Blocks class led by Rafael Moreno, who I guide as a teacher new to teaching programming.
+
+Before the summer, I reached out to an acquaintance, Neil Plotnik, who teaches cybersecurity at a nearby high school. I [met Neil during my time at the Free Software Foundation](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/free-software-in-education-and-free-software-education) (FSF). He suggested that I reach out to the Computer Science (CS) teacher at his high school. Long story short, I spent a few weeks getting these youth ready to help with coding, mainly teaching them how to use git version control. These students had done a few coding projects at their school, but hadn’t yet contributed to a community project. They hadn’t used git before, which is important to know for software development (and the underlying concepts are important skills for any endeavor), so I spent most of the time showing them the basics. To be honest, I was a little bit surprised to find myself teaching git to a CS class, but I suppose this highlights one of the many reasons why an organization such as Sugar Labs is important. Sugar Labs offers pathways into collaborative software development that textbook coding exercises do not.
+
+Over the summer, I mentored a few contributors for Google Summer of Code (GSoC). A lot of this work is online, on our Medium blog and our YouTube channel. At the same time, however, I also worked with a student of mine, Nathan, who asked to have some internship experience over the summer. I’ve taught this particular student for almost ten years now. He’s taken guitar lessons with me, and he’s taken Music Blocks classes with Walter Bender and myself. First, I asked him to create some fun projects for kids, which he did with gusto. You can read about his projects here: [https://musicblocks.net/2024/08/05/nyc-interactive-subway/](https://musicblocks.net/2024/08/05/nyc-interactive-subway/) and [https://musicblocks.net/2024/07/18/sitar-tabla-and-tampura-for-makey-makey/](https://musicblocks.net/2024/07/18/sitar-tabla-and-tampura-for-makey-makey/). Then, I asked him to create lesson plans, which he also did very well. And then, near the end of the summer, I involved him with testing some of the latest development for Music Blocks, which included a few [AI projects](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyTz5XRZyi-xR5NGo1fHLbYJYo2OwRFta). Testing these required that he set up a development environment, test the software as a user, and report the results as issues on GitHub. His work over the summer marked a good amount of growth and progress, which continues to this day.
+
+
+
+Nathan, testing new features for Music Blocks.
+
+At the beginning of the school year in the fall, I began mentoring a fellow teacher who is leading a Music Blocks class on a weekly basis. I provide the teacher, Rafael Moreno, guidance in lesson planning and feedback on classes. Rafael is a singer from Panama, now living in Boston, MA, working as a teaching artist.
+
+Also in the fall, I started teaching kindergarten and first grade students in a weekly computer class. This class happens at the same time as Rafael teaches Music Blocks. We decided to split the group by age, and I decided that my (younger) group would benefit most from doing something a little more open ended and basic. So, for the first day, I prepared some OLPC laptops for the kids, and I had them just try the Speak Activity. They had a blast. At one point, I tried to show them another Activity, but they insisted on continuing with the Speak Activity. The following week, we had a new student and I didn’t have more than two OLPCs, so I prepared two Thinkpad X1s with Sugar Toast installed for the new student and for Kai, who joined us that day to show the group what else the computers could do. Kai did a wonderful job leading this second day of classes, and it was heartwarming to see him share his knowledge with his new friends in the class. As of now, I’ve taught this class for a few months, and the kids have explored several of the Activities, including [Maze](http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4071), [Write](http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4201), [Chat](http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4069), [Turtle Blocks](http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4027), and several of the [games](http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/browse/type:1/cat:60). At the end of each class, the kids are asked to share with the class what they’re working on. And, on the last day of class before the break, they presented their work to their parents.
+
+
+
+Two of my students, smiling during their second class, using the Sugar Learning Platform on two OLPCs.
+
+One of the things that strikes me the most from this particular class is the _joy_ that the kids show as they’re working on their activities. It reminds me of a study I read by Bloom, described in Robert J. Trotter’s article for _Psychology Today_, July 1986, “The Mystery of Mastery”. Studying how people achieve mastery, Bloom observed a few common factors among those who became experts as adults. The children who later became experts were introduced to the field as a playful activity, and learning at this stage was “like a game.” As for Sugar, the kids in my class are learning a lot of things in the class, such as spelling, typing, and language, but the playfulness they exhibit is developmentally appropriate. This is consistent with the research on human development, and I’ve found it to hold true during my own work in the classroom.
+
+
+
+Here are the notes I took in college that I used to reference the above paragraph. I add it here because I no longer have access to the original article, and I could not find a copy online. If you find a link to a electronic copy, please drop it into the comments below.
+
+Conclusions
+===========
+
+As I alluded to earlier, I have sometimes heard criticism of the Sugar Learning Platform, suspecting that it may be out of touch with the needs of the students. The criticism is typically accompanied by an argument that youth should be preparing for job skills by using a platform more similar to what an office worker uses (e.g. _Shouldn’t the kids be taught how to use Microsoft Word instead?_). However, as an educator, I’ve never bought that argument. And now that I’ve spent ten years with Sugar — both as an educator and as a parent — I wholly reject it. I can say confidently that youth learn very important skills through their engagement with Sugar. And perhaps most importantly, they are introduced to concepts in stages that are appropriate to their development.
+
+
+
+One of the students in my Sugar class. She surprised me by coming in with this hand-drawn computer, which she made just a few days after taking one of her first classes.
+
+I’m more proud than I ever have been to be a part of the Sugar community, and my decades’ long experience with youth from ages five through college, only gives me stronger conviction that we’re creating something of unique value for education.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_posts/2024-9-13-Writing-new-Activities-and-sharing-sugar-with-youth.md b/_posts/2024-9-13-Writing-new-Activities-and-sharing-sugar-with-youth.md
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+---
+layout: story
+title: "Writing new Activities and sharing sugar with Youth"
+date: 2024-9-13
+author: "James Simmons"
+categories: stories
+---
+
+Writing new Activities and sharing Sugar with Youth
+================================================================================
+
+
+
+_Editorial note: This article was given to us by Sugar Labs community member James Simmons as part of a series called Sugar Stories, which aims to highlight stories from members our community. If you would like to share your Sugar Story with us as an article for possible publication, please send a draft to_ [_info@sugarlabs.org_](mailto:info@sugarlabs.org)_. Please be aware that there is an editorial process that will require some additional effort and collaboration, even after submission._
+
+I started working with OLPC with the Give One Get One program back in 2007. Honestly speaking, at the time, I was more interested in getting an XO laptop for myself than in working for the project. I thought I could use the laptop to read plain textbooks from [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/). Kindles were very expensive back then, and this looked like a good alternative. And it was. But, at the time, the Read Activity only worked with PDFs. In an effort to expand this functionality, I taught myself to program in Python, studied the code for the [Read Activity](https://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4028), and created the [Read Etexts Activity](https://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035), which supported reading plain text files. Next, I decided that I wanted to have an Activity for reading comic books in CBZ format and created two of them: [View Slides](https://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4039) and [Read SD Comics](https://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4340).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Photo of James Simmons with a copy of “Make your own Sugar Activities”. Simmons has been contributing to Sugar since 2007.
+
+At the time, the best, and maybe only, way to learn how to create Activities was to study the code of existing ones. I’m a systems analyst, so that wasn’t too difficult for me, since I already had some of the important skills needed to do this. But this situation wasn’t great for teachers and their students who may want to create Activities but didn’t yet have the skills needed. In 2009 or so, I convinced myself to write a proper manual, which we called [_Make Your Own Sugar Activities!_](https://archive.org/details/MakeYourOwnSugarActivities) I did this using the Floss Manuals website. I was fortunate enough to have a very nice cover illustration done for me by [Oceana Rain Fields](https://archive.flossmanuals.net/make-your-own-sugar-activities/about-the-authors.html), a student participating in the Rural Design Collective’s summer mentorship program. The printed book was given out as a door prize at one of the first OLPC conferences. The book was later translated into Spanish by a team of Sugar Labs volunteers as [_Como Hacer Una Actividad Sugar_](https://archive.org/details/ComoHacerUnaActividadSugar).
+
+My personal involvement in Sugar Labs did not require any direct work with children, but, recently, I had the opportunity to introduce a young boy to Sugar. I had an old computer that I was going to give to a family friend, who was studying computer programming in college. His nine-year-old brother found out about it and wanted it for himself, so I installed the latest [Sugar Learning Platform](https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/What_is_Sugar#About_the_Sugar_Learning_Platform) and updated my old Activities to run on Python 3. He is pleased to have [the same operating system (OS) used by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS)](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/gnu-linux-chosen-as-operating-system-of-the-international-space-station) and enjoys playing [Tux Kart](https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page). I look forward to introducing him to even more that Sugar has to offer in the coming months.
+
+It’s nice to have the [Sugar environment](https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/What_is_Sugar) as an option for kids, as well as ways for the community to participate in the creation of new Activities.
\ No newline at end of file
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Story 1: The connection between Sugar - Students - Teachers
--
- One of the first formal studies of Sugar took place in Uruguay in 2009–10. Uruguay was the first country to provide every child a free internet-connected laptop computer. They began distributing OLPC XO laptops running Sugar in 2007. Even though Uruguay is a relatively small country, with less than 500,000 children, it took several years before they could achieve full coverage. The last region to receive laptops was Montevideo. Montevideo was last because there was less need there than in the more rural regions, since many urban children already had access to computers. The delay in deploying in Montevideo presented an opportunity to study the impact of Sugar. Children were asked in 2009—before they has Sugar—what they did with their computers. It should come as no surprise that they used their computers to play games (See Figure). The same children were asked in 2010—after almost one year of using Sugar—what they did with their computers. Again they responded that they used their computers to play games. They were still children after all. But they also used their computers to write, chat, paint, make and watch videos, search for information, etc. In other words, with Sugar, they used the computer as a tool. Children play games. But given the opportunity and the correct affordances, they can leverage computation to do much much more.
-
- - Figure: Data from a DSPE-ANEP survey of students in Montevideo before and after the deployment of Sugar
-- Sugar was designed so that new uses emerging from the community could easily be incorporated, thus Sugar could be augmented and amplified by its community and the end users. We encouraged our end users to make contributions to the software itself. This was in part out of necessity: we were a small team with limited resources and we had no direct access to local curricula, needs, or problems. But our ulterior motive was to engage our users in development as a vehicle for their own learning.
-- One of the first examples of end-user contributions took place in Abuja, Nigeria, site of the first OLPC pilot project. While teachers and students took to Sugar quickly, they did confront some problems. The most notable of these was that the word-processor application, Write, did not have a spelling dictionary in Igbo, the dialect used in this particular classroom (and one of the more than three-hundred languages currently spoken in Nigeria). From a conventional software-development standpoint, solving this problem (300 times) would be prohibitively expensive. But for children in Abuja, equipped with Sugar, the solution was simple: confronted with the problem of lacking a dictionary, they made their own Igbo dictionary. The did not look for others to do the work for them. The took on the responsibility themselves. The Free/Libre Software ethic built into Sugar enabled local control and innovation.
-- John Gilmore heard the about our aspiration to reach out to our end users—children—at the 2008 Libreplanet conference. He asked, “how many patches have you received from kids?” At the time, the answer to his question was zero. But over the past nine years, the situation has changed dramatically. By 2015, 50% of the patches in our new releases were coming from children (See Table); our release manager in 2015–16 (Sugar v0.108) was Sam Parkinson, a fifteen-year-old from Australia; our current release manager (Sugar v0.110) is Ignacio Rodríguez, an eighteen-year-old from Uruguay who began hanging out on our IRC channel at age ten and contributing code at age twelve.
-Release number (date) |
- Total Commits |
- Youth Commits |
- Release note URL |
-
|---|---|---|---|
0.102 (July 2014) |
- 424 |
- 108 |
- - |
0.104 (February 2015) |
- 249 |
- 127 |
- - |
- Table 1: Sugar commits by youth contributors
-- When the now former president of Uruguay, José Mujica, learned that a twelve-year-old from a small town east of Montevideo had programmed six entirely new Sugar activities for the XO, he smiled and said triumphantly: “Now we have hackers.” In his eyes, this one child’s ability to contribute to the global Sugar development community was a leading indicator of change and - development in his country.
-- None of this happened on its own. End-user contributions are not simply an artifact of Sugar been Free/Libre Software. Open-source Software gives you access to the code and that Free/Libre Software gives you a license to make changes. But without some level of support, very few people will have the means to exercise the rights granted to them under the license. For this reason, we built scaffolding into Sugar to directly support making changes and extensions to Sugar applications and Sugar itself.
-- Sugar has no black boxes: the learner sees what the software does and how it does it. Sugar is written in Python and comes with all of the tools necessary to modify Sugar applications and Sugar itself. We chose Python as our development language because of its transparency and clarity. It is a very approachable language for inexperienced programmers. With just one keystroke or mouse click, the Sugar “view source” feature allows the user to look at any program they are running. A second mouse click results in a copy of the application being saved to the Sugar Applications directory, where it is immediately available for modification. (We use a “copy on write” scheme in order to reduce the risk of breaking critical tools. If there is no penalty for breaking code, there is better risk-reward ratio for exploring and modifying code.) The premise is that taking something apart and reassembling it in different ways is a key to understanding it.
-- Not every creative use of Sugar involves programming. Rosamel Norma Ramírez Méndez is a teacher from a school in Durazno, a farming region about two-hours drive north from Montevideo, Uruguay. Ramírez had her lessons for the week prepared when, first thing Monday morning, one of her students walked into her classroom holding a loofa. The child asked Ramírez, “teacher, what is this?” Rather than answering the question, Ramírez seized the opportunity to engage her class in an authentic learning experience. She discarded her lesson plans for the week. Instead, on Monday the children figured out what they had found; on Tuesday they determined that they could grow it in their community; on Wednesday they investigated whether or not they should grow it in their community; on Thursday they prepared a presentation to give to their farmer parents on Friday about why they should grow this potential cash crop. Not every teacher has the insight into learning demonstrated by Ramírez. And not every teacher has the courage to discard their lesson plans in order to capture a learning opportunity, But given an extraordinary teacher, she was able to mentor her students as they used Sugar as a tool for problem-solving. Ramírez encouraged her students to become active in their learning, which means that they engaged in doing, making, problem-solving, and reflection.
-- “Teachers can learn (and contribute) too.” – Walter Bender
-- Sometimes teachers have been directly involved in Sugar software development. Sugar has an abacus application to help children explore whole-number arithmetic and the concept base (the activity allows the user to switch between various base representations of whole numbers). It also lets children design their own abacus. Teachers in Caacupé, Paraguay, were searching for a way to help their students with the concept of fractions. After playing with the Sugar abacus activity, they conceived and created—with the help of the Sugar developer community—a new abacus that lets children add and subtract fractions (See Figure). Sugar didn't just enable the teachers to invent, it encouraged them to invent.
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- - Figure: The Caacupé Abacus. The white beads represent whole numbers. The black beads - represent fractions.
-- Guzmán Trinidad, a high-school physics teacher from Montevideo, Uruguay and Tony Forster, a retired mechanical engineer from Melbourne, Australia collaborated on a collection of physics experiments that could be conducted with a pair of alligator clips and a small collection of Sugar applications. In the process of developing their experiments, they maintained regular communication with the developers, submitting bug reports, documentation, feature requests, and the occasional patch. Other examples of teacher and community-based contributions include Proyecto Butiá, a robotics and sensor platform build on top of Sugar (and GNOME) at Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Uruguay. Butiá inspired numerous other robotics platforms, e.g., RoDI (Robot Didáctico Inalámbrico) developed in Paraguay, as well as a wealth of projects aligned with the pedagogy of Constructionism. In the spirit of Sugar, these hardware projects were all designed to be “open”: schematics and firmware were made available under Free/Libre licenses.
-- In 2012, we were part of a team running a week-long Sugar workshop for more than 60 teachers who had traveled to Chachapoyas, the regional capital of the Amazonas region of Peru. During the day we spend time reviewing the various Sugar activities and discussing strategies for using Sugar in the classroom. In the evenings, we gave a series of optional workshops on specialized topics. One evening, mid-week, the topic was fixing bugs in Sugar. It was not expected that many teachers would attend—in part because we were competing with an annual festival and in part because their background in programming was minimal. But almost everyone showed up. In the workshop, we walked through the process of fixing a bug in the Sugar Mind Map activity and used git to push a patch upstream. Teachers, especially rural teachers, have a hunger for knowledge about the tools that they use. This is in part due to intellectual curiosity and in part due to necessity: no one is going to make a service call to Amazonas. As purveyors of educational technology we have both a pedagogical and moral obligation to provide the means by which our users can maintain (and modify) our products. Enabling those closest to the learners is in the interest of everyone invested in educational technology as it both ensures viability of the product and it is a valuable source of new ideas and initiatives. -
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References
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- Ceibal Jam (2009). Convenio marco entre la Asociación Civil Ceibal Jam y la Universidad de la República. -
- DSPE-ANEP (2011). Informe de evaluación del Plan Ceibal 2010 . Administración Nacional de Educación Pública Dirección Sectorial de Planificación Educativa Área de Evaluación del Plan Ceibal. -
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