Devin, I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for, but this is my story:
I started working with OLPC with the Give One Get One program back in 2007. 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 text books from Project Gutenberg. Kindles were very expensive back then and this looked like a good alternative, and it was, but I was disappointed to find out that the Read Activity provided only worked with PDFs. I taught myself to program in Python, studied the code for the Read Activity, and created the Read Etexts Activity which supported reading plain text files. I next decided I wanted to have an Activity for reading comic books in CBZ format and created two of them: View Slides and Read SD Comics. The best and maybe only way to learn how to create Activities at that time was to study the code of existing ones. I'm a Systems Analyst so that wasn't too bad for me but for teachers and their students it wasn't great. Somehow or other in 2009 or 2010 I convinced myself to write a proper manual, called *Make Your Own Sugar Activities!* 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, 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*. I followed this up with a manual on obtaining, reading, and donating free ebooks called *EBook Enlightenment*, with cover and interior illustrations also provided by Oceana Rain Fields. To research this book I donated books to archive.org and Project Gutenberg and made a book scanning device of my own design for photographing book pages. I also installed a local instance of the Floss Manuals Booktype software and used it and some Linux OCR software to finish a manuscript that I had abandoned back in the nineteen eighties, about my experiences in the Hare Krishna movement, which I renamed to *The Life And Times of Bhakta Jim*. I fell away from participating in Sugar Labs after that, but I continued donating texts to archive.org and Project Gutenberg and have been working on a Science Fiction novel which I may one day finish. My participation in Sugar Labs never involved any work with actual children, but recently I had the opportunity to introduce a nine year old boy to Linux. I had intended to give his older brother (who was studying computer programming in college) an old Linux desktop but his brother decided that it should be his computer instead. I gave the computer a functioning Sugar environment and rewrote some of my old Activities in Python 3 to work on that, but for now he's mostly interested in learning Flight Gear and playing games like Tux Kart and Sopwith. James Simmons On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 9:16 AM Devin Ulibarri <de...@sugarlabs.org> wrote: > Dear Sugar community members, > > Sugar Labs is growing, and we need volunteer help with various tasks. > > To help keep track of the various roles and tasks where help is needed, I > created the following page on our wiki: > https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Help_Wanted > Some of the roles that I'd like to highlight are: > > - Elections Officer: Help run elections for Sugar Labs' board members; > This role will receive support from myself, as ED, and the board. > - Website help: sugarlabs.org is a static site, created with Jeckyll. > We could use some help updating it, improving it, and documenting a > workflow > - New volunteers for our Marketing Team: Help us bring Sugar Labs to > the people! > - Sugar Labs stories: Did participating in the Sugar Labs community > have a positive impact on your life? If so, we'd like to help you tell that > story. Simply send an approx. three paragraph draft, and we'll help you > edit and publish it. > - Don't have any time for the above? Well, the easiest way to support > with your time is to follow us on social media and share/boost our posts. > Help us spread the word! > > Best, > > Devin > > -- > > Learn more: https://sugarlabs.org > > Help us grow: https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Donate > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel >
_______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
