Sugar Beets

Saturday 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.

Today’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

Wow - 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.

I 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.

Filed tickets for today: 990, 991