On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 7:51 AM, David Farning
dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:54 PM, John Watlington w...@laptop.org wrote:
On Sep 10, 2013, at 5:04 PM, Sameer Verma wrote:
On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote:
One of the things that makes Sugar the ideal learning platform for
children (and youth) is the wonderful compatibility of so many of the
Activities ... both from Activity to Activity and from student to student.
This facilitates the sort of learning we are all hoping to see more of...
creative problem solving, project based learning and cooperative learning.
Without this ability to integrate parts of projects, it would just be
another collection of apps.
I did not want to muddy the picture by injecting my own viewpoint, but now
that I've heard from others (on and off list) it is clear that the split is
driven by the role they play in the ecosystem.
Most technologists have come up with reasons why they don't think a complete
Sugar experience would work on Android. Therefore, activities must run like
any other app on Android. On the other hand, as Caryl said, Without this
ability to integrate...it would just be a collection of apps.
Somewhat knowing the limitations of what can be done with Sugar stuff on
Android, but disregarding that for a minute, I would say that Sugar as a
*platform* is an experience. It has a UI. It has a UX. Everything from the
Zoom interface to the activities to the Journal is Sugar. We have taken the
original Sugar on the OLPC XO experience and replicated that to the
classmate PC, SoaS, and other spins and distros, but in none of these cases
did we break the holistic Sugar experience. Now, along comes a popular OS,
and because the tech parts don't fit, we are advocating breaking up the
pieces and taking whatever flies. Memorize will become one of the few
hundred thousand apps on Android.
I disagree.
It's like saying we'll do the cat sprite from Scratch, but nothing else.
It's like saying we'll do the birds and pigs from Angry Birds, but not the
slingshot. Sugar, without all its pieces isn't worth the trouble.
Sameer,
I disagree somewhat with your thesis (and am very glad you started this
discussion.)
From a technological standpoint, it is actually probably easier to implement
what you describe:
Sugar as a monolithic Android application, which takes over the entire user
interface when
launched. The reason I never considered it seriously was the larger
ecosystem.
The reason to move to Android from Linux is two-fold:
- Chip vendors are dropping Linux support in favor of Android. The cheap
chinese ARM
vendors only support Android.
- Android/iOS are where application development is happening. There is a
much larger
community of Android developers than Linux or Sugar developers.
The hope was to provide the infrastructure underlying Sugar (the Journal
datastore and
collaboration) as Android services, encouraging their use in new Android
applications.
In this model, the Journal is another Android application, accessing the
Journal datastore service.
New Sugar activities written in HTML should be capable of running in Sugar
on Linux
or as Android activities (although perhaps with different execution
wrappers).
In this manner, perhaps we can enlarge the Sugar community with developers
mainly
targeting Android.
Just to clarify:
1. OLPC-A's intention is to create a HTML5+JS framework for creating
Sugar Activities.
2. Sugar Activities created using this framework will run equally well
on both 'Sugar for linux' and Android.
3. This requires two separate abstraction layers wrapper one for
Sugar on linux and one for Android.
4. These abstraction layers make Sugar Services such as collaboration
and the journal available within the HTML5+JS framework.
Is there an implementation plan and roadmap available? Are there
sufficient resources committed to these projects to see them through
to completion?
I just wanted to follow up this thread. I find it interesting because
the answer depend a bit on the person asking the questions. Is the
person asking the questions:
1. An OLPC hater who is going to hate.
2. A muggle who is not capable of understanding OLPC.
3. A person who has proven that they support the OLPC vision while
occasionally questioning the Association's stewardship of that vision.
If we pursue Sugar as a single Android application,
with embedded
Python activities, we are isolating ourselves from the Android community.
The danger of this approach is the loss of an integrated UX. This could be
addressed
by customizing the home UI, in the same manner that the XO tablet has a
custom home UI
implementing the Dreams interface, but that would require rooting the
tablet in some manner.
But the native Android UI isn't that bad...
Cheers,
wad
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