The sticks are here!

March 4th, 2010

sticks3

Yesterday was a great day for the Planetarium Deployment in Berlin, Germany. We gave out a USB key containing the Sugar on a Stick (Soas) version Strawberry to every learner in our class!

This is a big milestone in this deployment. The learners have now the possibility to use the Sugar learning platform at home. This will allow them to dig deeper, to discover at their own pace. I am very excited how much this will change the way the learners will use Sugar. I will definitely let you know how we progress!

To make this all happen some work had to be done beforehand. Of course I needed to find some sticks. As not every kid had a stick they could use themselves I looked for a partner to help to the little data storage devices. OLPC Deutschland kindly offered to donate the sticks for the deployment - thanks very much!

Once I had the sticks there was the question which Soas/Sugar version I should put on them. Myself I had used Soas-Strawberry for months now and was really happy with the performance and stability. And as I use Sugar 0.84 in my class too, I decided this was the way to go. I had to fix a few bugs that were introduced by updates (Etoys, Write) and together with Sebastian we worked out an easy way to localize the image. Thanks Sebastian for all your support in those last weeks. I also want to thank the Sugar Labs infrastructure team for providing me with the environment to build the images, and especially Sascha which helped me to setup my login on a, normally lazy, Sunday afternoon.

I want to thank as well all the translators that made the localized Sugar environment possible. This is a great strength of the Sugar platform and the Sugar community which is hard to beat.

Now the learners took the sticks home and the next exciting part is if they will manage to boot them. Unfortunately there are many things that can go wrong. Some machines can not boot from USB directly for example. That issue I have solved by providing the students with boot helper CDs. But even though they have the CD, on some machines you have to set the boot options in the BIOS first. And getting into the BIOS is different on every machine, and even if the device is set in the BIOS on certain machines you still have to hit a key on boot to select the USB device to boot from. And how do you give good instructions to a young learner to make settings in the BIOS? Of course I asked the students to do the setup with their parents, but still I am very excited what the outcome is. For how many will it boot directly? At least I have feedback from one student that it booted right away for him… :)

All in all, I think this is a success story, and I hope this encourages the community to keep on working towards their goals and others to make similar experiences to mine.

Create your localized Soas-Strawberry

March 2nd, 2010

There were some changes to the Sugar on a Stick strawberry git repository last night. We moved the part that localizes your image (language, keyboard and time zone) to a separate kickstart file. That way we hope to make it clearer how you can create your localized images.

Here is an example for a german image:


diff --git a/soas-international.ks b/soas-international.ks
index 355b216..cb00ea2 100644
--- a/soas-international.ks
+++ b/soas-international.ks
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
-lang en_US.UTF-8
-keyboard us
-timezone US/Eastern
+lang de_DE.UTF-8
+keyboard de
+timezone Europe/Berlin

Btw, if you need to create a boot loader for your image you can use the script provided in the repository. Simply do:
/boot-helper-creator.sh [path to iso of which to create a boot helper] (You must use sudo or be root on most system to do that).

Neues Museum

December 14th, 2009

Das Neue Museum auf der Berliner Museumsinsel hat wieder geöffnet!

Das im Krieg zerstörte Museum wurde von David Chipperfield voll restauriert. Hierbei ist das Museum ein Ausstellungsstück selbst, da alte Teile liebevoll erhalten und integriert wurden. Sehen und Staunen Sie selbst, ein Besuch lohnt sich.

Tipp: Donnerstags ist der Eintritt ab 16:00 frei.

Wo Ökostrom drauf steht ist nicht immer Ökostrom drin

December 10th, 2009

Durch Kopenhagen ist das Thema Klimawandel in aller Munde. Nun kann man warten was Heilsbringer wie Obama in der dänischen Hauptstadt entscheiden oder selbst tätig werden. Für Einsteiger empfiehlt sich zum Beispiel der Umstieg auf Ökostrom.

Dies ist im Prinzip ganz einfach. In Deutschland gibt es 4 “echte” Ökostromanbieter. Zum einen sollte der neue Anbieter den Strom aus erneuerbaren Energiequellen und Kraft-Wärme-gekoppelten Anlagen erzeugen. Zum anderen sollte der Anbieter wirtschaftlich nicht mit einem der Energie-Multis verflochten sein die Atomkraft fördern. Eine genaue Untersuchung dieser Kriterien hat robinwood.de durchgeführt. Der Umstieg ist dann ganz einfach - beim neuen Stromanbieter anmelden und den Rest erledigt der neue Anbieter. “Zu hoher Aufwand”, ist also kein Argument weiterhin seine Energie aus herkömmlichen Quellen zu beziehen.

Für alle Sparer: Das Vorurteil, Ökostrom sei etwas für Besserverdienende, hat sich längst überholt. Schon heute gibt es zahlreiche Beispiele dafür, dass Strom aus Sonne, Wind, Wasser, Biomasse und Kraft-Wärme-Kopplung nicht teurer sein muss, als der aus Atom- und Kohlekraftwerken. Auf den Anbieter-Seiten kann man mit einem Rechner dies einfach überprüfen.

Chinese Coconut Rice balls

November 22nd, 2009

You can use glutinous rice flour to make these yummy coconut rice balls, often served at Chinese new year (or at various chinese restaurants (found already in Paris, NY…). Just mix the flour with sugar and water (200gr flour, 100gr sugar and 250ml water) and put it into a steam bath for 30 minutes.

Then use the dough and add the coconuts, fill it with whatever you like (peanuts, mango…) and role little balls. Enjoy!

sfscon_rice_balls_blog1

Aus der Wahlkabine

September 21st, 2009

Die Wahl rückt näher und es gibt sicherlich noch einige Unentschlossene. Der moderne Bürger verwendet zur Entscheidungsfindung den wahl-o-mat der Bundeszentrale der politischen Bildung. Sicherlich keine schlecht Variante um einen ersten Überblick zu bekommen. Und für die politische Früherziehung gibt es den wahl-o-maten auch als multiplayer online game bei dem man die Spitzenkandidaten gegeneinander antreten lassen kann.

Es gibt aber noch den klassischen Wahlkampf bei dem die direkte Kontaktaufnahme mit Wahlplakaten ein fester Bestandteil ist. Ob Hitlerbärtchen, Riesenohren oder die sexuelle Einordnung der Kandidaten, hier sind keine kreativen Grenzen gesetzt. Für 2013 hat ein pfiffiger schwäbischer Erfinder eine Spraydose mit Rechtschreibüberprüfung angekündigt. Ein weiterer Schritt um die Schieflage der deutschen Bildungsflotte in europäischen Studien zu begradigen.

Wählen kann man übrigens schon jetzt. Direkt im Bezirkswahlamt oder per Briefwahl. Terminlich begründete Ausreden sind daher nicht entgegen zunehmen. Erststimme, Zweitstimme, das ist dann ja alles recht übersichtlich. Beim Zukleben des blauen Umschlages machte mich dann aber die Wahlwerbung der Linken für ihren Peter ‘Sodann’ stutzig. Die Wahlfrau sagte zwar, dies sei nur etwas unglücklich platziert und man müsse den Satz zu Ende lesen, ich habe das ‘Sodann’ dennoch vorsichtshalber durchgestrichen.

Change the Browse start page

September 3rd, 2009

Wikipedia is quite a good source for free pictures. And most of them are appropriate for kids as well. And it is in most cases a great resource to verify data, for example the capital of a country.

Also you want to have the search (google and wikipedia) localized. The wikipedia.patch adds a wikipedia search field localized to german. Furthermore it localizes the google search to german and localizes the links at the top left. The file you have to edit is the data/index.html in the Browse activity folder.

Third day of a 4 day teaching marathon (Part one)

September 3rd, 2009

Today I had fifth graders and was curious to try out something new. I split up the 2 hours course into one hour of Turtle Art followed by one hour to create Memory games.

In my introduction course into turtle art I make use of following geometrical figures: a square and a circle. So before starting to work with the computers I repeat the preferences of a square (four equal sides and four equal angles (90 degree angles, or right angles) and of a circle (full circle 360 degree and a quarter circle 90 degree). Then I let them start the computer and TurtleArt (Interesting - several of the kids thought that the activity TurtleArt icon was an alarm clock). I explain briefly that the turtle is a pen they can draw with by using programming blocks.

First, I show the students how to instruct the turtle to move forward N steps.

move_forward

Then how the turtle can turn the direction. Starting from 90 degrees then changing the value to 45 degrees. Here one can go back to the discussion of the circle and how many times I have to click on the programming block that the turtle does a full circle. Often, I see the kids having issues to understand that the turtle does turn without moving forward.

turn_right_45

Then I want everyone to draw a square using the two instructions, “go forward” and “turn right”.

square

The transfer part of this exercise is to draw an octogon.

octogon

The concept of loops I introduce with the words: “Programmers are lazy people, and we always try to let the computer do the work. Instead of clicking 4 times on the instruction box, one can use a loop to get the work done.”

loop_square

And for the transfer the octogon.

loop_octogon

Let’s go one step further and combine two loops. In the next program we have an inner and and outer loop. The inner loop is still the same from the previous exercise. After drawing a square or octogon we turn the turtle by 10 degrees. To do a full circle we need to do that 36 times. The outer loop does do the inner one 36 times.

outer_loop

To make things more colorful, one can change the color after drawing an object. The color value can be the current direction, which works nicely in this example.

outer_loop_color

The students did follow quite well and repeated the examples I showed. I did let some time for manipulating the examples and let them try by themselves. Some really nice pictures were the result.

Pretty impressive how far one can get in one hour with turtle art. The class teacher explained me that the kids would learn circle and radius this semester. I think we had a great first introduction into geometry in that one hour course. The students did get the concepts really well and all in all I think they had some fun too.

Second day of a 4 day teaching marathon

September 2nd, 2009

Today I introduced a class of 4th grade students to the Sugar platform. Creating memorize games was topic of this session, as well.

I explained to the kids that we would use the milkmoon search engine instead of the google one. This worked for some of the kids fine (search: Pokemon, Katze…). For some search items (e.g. Pferd) the search engine returned a blank page. And some of the search items like “Hertha BSC” a german football club or the “Winx club” a kid’s cartoon did not return any result. So some of the kids I did let use google to get their pictures for the memory game.

Paint
As I introduced paint at the beginning of the lesson many kids did choose to paint pictures as well. They like the form (star, heart etc) tool. With paint I had several observations:

- Many kids had problems to find the color chooser. We have to switch to the new color chooser already available in Write.

- It is hard for the kid to differ between the shape and the filling color. It is not really possible to have both the exact same color.

- The reset to blank page was hard to find, maybe this gets easier with the new toolbar design

- It would be nice to have a crop to selection method

- we should make the selection with fixed ratio option present in the UI

- there is no text size available

- when kids use the fill bucket tool too heavily, the activity can get unresponsive

Memorize
The main issue with Memorize is, as Caroline and her team pointed already out, the separation between the play and edit mode. It is a bit cumbersome for the kids to save in the edit mode and load again in the play mode. For the toolbar redesign we need to rethink this interaction anyhow. I will keep this issue in mind when doing so.

Furthermore, there is no way to clear an entry in the add box. A little ‘-’ right to the entry like for each pair would be a solution.

Last but not least, the audio part is not fully functional. After adding a sound you can not listen to it again. Only in the play mode.

More findings tomorrow.

First day of a 4 day teaching marathon

September 1st, 2009

Today was my first day of a 4 day teaching marathon with Sugar in a primary school in Berlin. I have a different class each day. 8-10 I have the first half of the class, about 14 kids, then the second half from 10-12. There are 4th, 5th and 6th grade classes.

As an introduction into Sugar I like to do the creating of Memory games. This is a fun task for everyone to do and involves the use of several activities: Paint, Browse to download images and sounds, Record to capture pictures and sounds and of course Memorize itself. Several peripheries, audio input, camera input, audio output. They make extensive use of the Journal as well. I use Fedora 11 and a ‘customized’ Sugar 0.84 for the course.

Experiences from today:

1) Google images is not appropriate for finding pictures, for young kids! A too high percentage of the content is sexual or simply rotten. An alternative is the kid’s search engine Blinde Kuh. Though, I find it a bit hard to use for image searching. The engine milkmoon works better for those purposes. I will see how far we can get with this tomorrow. And I will animate the kids to create content in Paint. For example someone created flags in paint today, quite cool.

2) Sound: People are visual! Not so many kids want to choose to work with sounds. They like to play the sound example in memorize, though. Maybe they think it is too hard? For my class I have uploaded a few sound files from the excellent olpc sound bank. Unfortunately, the bank is not as easy to browse when one is looking for a specific sound. There is a big archive at tierstimmen.org, but I only found mp3’s so far.

3) Annoying “Naming Alert”: As much as I am a friend of highlighting the naming, tagging and description purposes, I don’t think the alert is a good way to ‘enforce’ this. I think those actions are not first class ones. I am happy when the kids understood the concept of the Journal a bit, but they will not start to make better descriptions in the first Sugar days or weeks, with or without the alert. For now, it is just a confusing dialog that pops up when you close an activity. And later, once the kids would know about the importance they would be better served with other tools. For example an option in the activity toolbar (like we have for the title already). From my experience I highly recommend to remove the alert, +1 when for 0.86 already.

4) Spell-Checker: Many kids have spelling difficulties. I would like to see this added as an overall tool to the platform (frame device or similar, like Sayamindu suggested for the translate one as well). The thing is, I do not want to make it too easy. If it is too easy, the kids will just rely on it, and do not think about the correct spelling themselves, and then are unable to spell the word without Sugar. Maybe a gratification system would be a good solution. For example, if I type in a word and I get it right (so mainly to verify that it is correct) I could get a point into the Journal (using good old Bubble-Bubblo-fruit-style-coins for example).

More infos from the field tomorrow.