==Sugar Digest==
1. I am just back from two weeks on the road. My primary destination
was the EduJam event in Montevideo. As you have no doubt already
heard, the meeting was very productive: a great opportunity for
developers, teachers, and other community members from the region to
share ideas—what works and what challenges remain ahead of us. Many
thanks for Gabriel Eirea, Gonzalo Odiard, Pablo Flores, Andrés
Ambrois, Adam Holt, and everyone else who helped to organize the
event. Also, thanks to everyone who took the time to come from near
and far—we had participants who travelled from as far away as Siberia
in attendance. It really was a community effort.
What struck me above and beyond the passion that the Sugar community
has for providing great learning opportunities for children is that we
have reached a turning point in the project. While software is never
complete—see the discussion below—the bulk of the discussion was not
about Python, Forth, or Smalltalk. Rather, it was about how to better
utilize the tools we have in the classroom and how to provide support
to teachers as they make the transition from instructors to guides and
participants in a discovery process. Indeed, even my pre- and
post-EduJam meetings at Plan Ceibal were primarily focused on pedagogy
rather than technology.
We got some further insight into how Sugar is being used in the
classroom from a data-driven presentation given by Plan Ceibal (See
http://www.anep.edu.uy/anepweb/servlet/main004?403). While it was not
surprising to see that Browse, Write, and Record were among the most
used activities, and that the children enjoy Tuxpaint and games, it
was heartening to see that Etoys and Turtle Art are also popular.
There was a skew in the statistics between poor, rural schools and
more well-to-do urban schools. In the latter, the use of Etoys and
Turtle Art was much greater.
We had a discussion about how to best reach out to teachers—for
sharing best practice and so I asked if they had any data on where the
Uruguayan teachers hang out. (There is lots of material available in
our wiki, but apparently the teachers are not finding it. I think we
need to go to where the teachers are rather than expect them to come
to us.) Alas, there are no data yet that we can leverage.
The real take-away for me was the growing demand for better channels
of communication between teachers and the broader Sugar community.
I gave a talk at the end of the first day of the meeting
(http://www.slideshare.net/eduJam2011/edujam-walter) in which I tried
to remind everyone that we need to keep our eyes on where we want to
go as a community and not to be distracted by short-term quick fixes.
Quoting Skip Barber: You go where you look, so you better look where
you want to go. Going to specifics, I made some observations about
the Sugar Journal. I reminded everyone that its primary purpose was to
be a place of reflection for the learner and that we should not dilute
that vision. To drive my point home, I made an analogy to the commit
message that is required whenever someone submits a patch to git. We
want our learners to compose a commit message every time they work
on something, thus providing a history of not just what they did, but
why they did it. (This rant was in response to a recent decision to
remove the naming alert from the activity close dialog, where we
presented an opportunity to write descriptive text in the Journal.)
Sugar is a learning platform and our design and engineering decisions
must consider the impact on learning in order that we remain relevant.
2. Speaking of the Journal, one tangible outcome of the evaluation
summit held in Cambridge last month was the call for a simple way to
make a presentation from Journal entries. While you can use Turtle
Blocks to make a Power Point presentation, it requires a fair degree
of experience. At the Sugar Camp following EduJam I wrote a new
activity, Portfolio
[http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4437], which lets
you make a slide show from Journal entries that have been starred as
favorites. It is easy to use: just star the entries you want included
in the presentation and then launch the activity. It presents a
sequence of slides that include the Journal entry's title, preview
image, and any description written by the learner. It also has an
export function to save the presentation as an HTML document that can
be shared. Another step towards making studio thinking and portfolio
assessment part of the Sugar learning experience.
3. I struck gold in a meeting at Plan Ceibal. Mónica Báez arranged for
me to meet with her team, which is driving the curriculum development
and teacher training for the project. Among them is a math teacher who
is responsible to the math teacher-training program and who was really
taken with some of Tony Forster's Turtle Block examples and another
teacher who is interested in a way to connect art and science; she is
specifically interested in having the
