Hi James,
It's helpful, yes, thanks again for sharing!
As a next step, I added it to
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jOVgY7PO0GzjkE2dsO2nfViC7DY5OVp_Qbe5zmZMBYE/edit
so that it can go through a collaborative editorial process before
publishing.
Cheers!
Devin
P.S. I found https://archive.org/details/MakeYourOwnSugarActivities --
I'm adding it to my list of stuff to share, plus linking it in your draft.
James Simmons:
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 <http://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 <http://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 <http://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
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