The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) mission is "to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning."
Sugar Labs has a complementary mission to serves as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the Sugar learning platform and create Sugar-compatible applications. Sugar, originally developed for the OLPC XO laptop, *is* "software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning." Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet. With Sugar, even the youngest learner will quickly become proficient in using the computer as a tool to engage in authentic problem-solving. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection, developing skills that help them in all aspects of life. OLPC continues to pursue its laptop mission and is dedicating its engineering resources to making the OLPC XO laptop more readily deployable. The Sugar Labs community is refining Sugar and is continues to work closely with OLPC in support of its mission. The Sugar community is growing as it purses additional opportunities for getting Sugar into the hands of children. As new opportunities emerge, the roles of the two organizations are becoming more distinct: (a) OLPC continues to ship Sugar on all of its laptops, as more laptops are shipped, more Sugar is deployed; (b) over time, as the number of non-OLPC deployments of Sugar increase, OLPC will be directly supporting a relatively smaller proportion of the Sugar development; and (c) many OLPC employees remain deeply committed as individuals to advancing Sugar and they continue to make core contributions to the Sugar community. As both individuals and organizations we share the common goal of getting great tools for thinking and learning into the hands of the children of the world. -walter -- 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