Tomeu has updated the code review guidelines to clarify and explain the rationale behind the code review process:
This is a great reading and helps to understand open source work, as well.
A must read for all the Sugar developers, in my opinion.
Archive for the ‘Sugar’ Category
Sugar code review guidelines updated
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009Fedora alpha slips for one week
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009The Fedora release engineering team has decided to slip the Fedora alpha release for one week.
As we are aligned to the Fedora schedule we could adjust our schedule as well. But I would like to stick to our schedule. This has the advantage to get a possible Sugar bugfix release in more easily and we stay aligned to other distributions.
The Sucrose 0.86 schedule, feature freeze is getting close…
Physics, Physics, Physics…
Saturday, July 11th, 2009…since days this activity dominates the scene. It was a big success at the Linuxtag booth and it is in my class experience. But what does it make so special?
If you have a booth and want attract passing visitors - you want to use Physics. We faced a big screen towards the visitors and started a simple Physics example with moving parts (pinned objects). The key here is “something moving”. Nearly as good as having a demo using video input. The nice thing with the 2D “playground” is that you can easily get involved. In the booth case, the visitors can quickly add objects to the scene.
In class usage you can observe similar things. It is an activity they can get very easily engaged with. In my working group this week I first did use Memorize and then showed Physics to one of the kids. And after a few minutes most of the other kids used it as well. Not much I had to explain. To enhance their usage I showed a few things, for example pinning an object. Pinning objects is not obvious to most of the kids until you show them once. Then, most of the users (I don’t say kids here because I did not get it right at the beginning neither) do try to pin an object when they create it in ‘play mode’. Of course it is much easier to stop the engine and pin the object instead of hunting the falling item.
One problem I observed with younger kids is the use of the mouse. In that age for example moving the mouse over the whole screen (like for closing an activity) is a hard task. Now, in physics to create an object you have to: click on the screen, hold the button and move the mouse to create the item at your desired size. Sounds hard doesn’t it? Maybe we can present the kid on right mouse click with a palette and let’s say 3 objects at different sizes to select from? Another barrier is to know that you have to click and move to create an object after selecting it at the toolbar. Maybe an initial screen with a hint, like in the Labyrinth activity would help (could be a comic strip for example). This reminds me of the requested, standard help functionality in Sugar…
As I said, the kids love it. They get very creative with it. I have seen a washing machine, a brush that is sweeping rubbish away etc. Of course, the first thing they do is bumping objects into each other and destroy houses by falling items - I leave the psychological interpretation to the reader ;p . Some requests I encountered so far are: unpin object, possibility to move/drag objects in ’stop mode’, erase all of the objects on the screen (handled by the line of death - can’t wait to tell them about it) and of course the journal integration - the most important one. A long term idea a kid had is being able to choose different materials for the objects. And as we all know colors are important - choosing the color for an object might be interesting as well. And to improve on the pedagogical side, a way to show the forces and other physical measurements involved would be nice, too.
This activity is a big success story and I am sure it will be a tool kids will love. You can get it at http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4193. And don’t miss to directly go and hack on it. Tony Forster points out as part of the great Modifying Activities series how to do this.
Thanks to all the work people did on this already - Gary, Brian, Alex and Chris and all the upstream developers of Pygame, Elements and Box2D.
Note: The same engine (Box2D) uses numptyphysics. A crayon-drawing based physics puzzle game. Originally developed for Maemo is as well available as a Fedora package and for many other distributions for people to try it out.
Linuxtag (Day 4)
Monday, June 29th, 2009Saturday was the final day of Linuxtag. The booth team was busy like the other days explaining what is special about Sugar, what are the differences to other UIs and how they can try it out at home. Sean demoed with a wide range of Netbooks running Sugar that we are on a good way to reach the goal of making the learning platform available on nearly any hardware.
In the afternoon we had several interesting talks. Greg gave his overview on open content and open lessons plans, we had a summary about the OLPC deployment in Uruguay and Svetlana Senajova experiences with the little green machine in an deployment in Afghanistan. I, myself introduced the Sugar platform, gave a status report and outlined where help is needed and how one can contribute to the Sugar Labs project. Sebastian had a live radio interview with Deutschlandfunk from cologne.
I am very happy about how the conference went. The Sugar Labs booth team were good representatives of a community that is easy to approach. I want to thank the team in spreading the word:
* Tony Anderson (deployment expert, hacking ShowNTell in the last minute to give a demo)
* David Van Assche (the OpenSuse link, more than 50 activities in the OpenSuse Soas version)
* Sean Daly (marketing expert, table full of netbooks and XOs)
* Sebastian Dziallas (Mister “Strawberry”)
* Bert and Rita Freudenberg and the Squeak Team (”Etoys can do more than the car example”)
* Adam Holt (OLPC XO 1.5 expert)
* James Zaki (a constant in demonstrating the learning platform )
Many thanks to Harald and all of the Skolelinux team, X2GO and Linux4Afrika for being our friendly booth partners. And one thing I was really happy about was the booth material we had available. Two banners, two posters, branded balloons, Flyers in English and German, generic business cards, a table full of different laptops running Sugar and a wide screen demo. Marketing wise this was a big step forward.
Linuxtag (Day 3)
Saturday, June 27th, 2009Today’s highlight was Tony Anderson giving a presentation about Olenepal at our booth using the activity ShowNTell. It was very interesting to hear how the XO and Sugar is used in the Nepal deployment. Here are a few images. There is a rumor that the ShowNTell activity will appear in activities.sugarlabs.org soon - so you can have a look at the full presentation ;p
Linuxtag (Day 2)
Friday, June 26th, 2009Wow - we had another interesting day at the Linuxtag. Still, the Physics activity is one of the favorite demos, Turtleart and Etoys impress people a lot as well, and let explain the concept of low floor, no ceiling perfectly. And people get the advantages of the Journal right away. My favorite moment was, when someone working with elderly people stated that Sugar was the platform he was looking for. Young and elderly people have similar needs - for example uncluttered interface, clear and big icons, activities that do only one specific task but that well.
More later - now a few photos as Sean arrived today our booth looks first class now.
Linuxtag (Day 1)
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009I had a great first day at Linuxtag today. Sugar Labs has a booth with Skolelinux, Linux4Africa, X2go and the Squeak team.
We have a demo machine running the Soas strawberry release and a 21” screen faced to the passing visitors. This attracted some of them and we were able to demo Sugar and got into interesting discussions. Most of the visitors are using Linux already so the conversations were going into details quite quickly. People were quite impressed and I am positive that we will see the one or another new contributor after those days. Of course we flashed as well a few sticks with “Strawberry”. I hope they got not too sticky.
Activity of today was Physics. It is such a nice tool - one can play for hours with it. Greg seemed already being addicted by creating crazy 2D scenarios. Thanks to Gary and Asaf for their work on it.
I have uploaded a pdf version of our flyer if someone ever happens to be at a booth and needs material to hand out. Thanks to Gary for the great artwork.
Diary activity
Sunday, June 21st, 2009Normally I start my explanations about the journal with: “It is something like a diary”. A child asked me if she can write what she did during her day in it. And this strikes as a nice idea to me.
Of course one can use the write activity for that, but maybe a customized activity for this task would be cool. What she had in mind was a page with:
- a picture of her (taken with the camera), so she can see how she changes over time, or maybe a painted picture as well to reflect her mood
- a text field to write things down
- the date
- a nice layout for the entry (maybe customizable)
- spell check functionality
What does others think about this? Anyone interested in working on this?
Turtleart — feedback from the field
Sunday, June 21st, 2009I have been using Turtleart in a lesson lately. And the kids did really like it. They were about 10 years old. Already the icon is a very good one. Kids do like the icon and click on it to see what it is like. If you want to reach the walk-in customers, make your icon look interesting.
a) Choosing the color of the pen is not as easy to do. The kids do not know what are the values referring to. I know there is a html table - but would be nice to have a color picker or something similar in Turtleart itself.
b) You can choose the rabbit to paint the image in one go. I really like this part. Someone had the idea to change the turtle icon to a rabbit when drawing in rabbit mode
c) Changing the turtle icon to something else. Of course the kids did ask this. Could be a nice way to introduce them into hacking.
d) dragging the blogs back on the palette to get rid of them can be tiring if you have many blocks around. Maybe a button to erase all blocks would be nice (an undo button would then be good as well I guess)
e) show source: as discussed with Walter already we should add the displaying of the TA document source to the standard dialog (like the html one in Browse), should be doable for 0.86
As I said - TA really does work well, congrats to everyone who has been involved.
PS: another favorite is Etoys - more on that hopefully in another post.
Strawberry weekend - or what a Sugar developer is doing the weekend
Sunday, June 21st, 2009We are getting very close to our final Sugar on a Stick image for the strawberry release. And I have been cooking marmalade for the first time all by myself last night. Want to try this at home? Here are the two receipts:
Sugar on a Stick release:
- 2 colleagues that work productively together and manage the efforts
- developers that are responsive and do changes the last minute if necessary
- testers that file good bug reports and follow up on them
-> communicate, communicate, communicate - that’s all
Marmalade:
- 1KG strawberries
- 400gr jam sugar (high pectin content)
-> wash the fruits, chop them into pieces, stir it up, put into glasses - that’s all
