Sugar Labs DC Producing Results

Our evening activities with Sugar Labs DC are producing results:

• Josh Eddy has our XS (School Server) up and running and is studying all he can about the jabber protocol so he can better understand how it works.
• Jamie Boisture is improving GASP each day is response to user feedback from our afternoon Python class.
• David Morris installed GASP on Patricia Paul's XO, and then installed Sugar inside virtualbox on my laptop.
• The kids in the morning Scratch (now more Sugar, really) class are providing us with a wealth of experience using Sugar with kids (I'm afraid they all have sweet teeth by now ;-)

Douglas Cerna wrote us to let us know the XOs are finally out of customs in El Salvador, and they were picked up yesterday by folks from the Buena Vista community, so we are moving forward on that front as well.

Developing a Sweet Tooth

After a week of working with Sugar with 13 young learners in our Scratch programming class, I'm beginning to develop a sweet tooth. I'm well aware that I should have done this much earlier, but is hard for me to focus on things that are not immediately relevant to the rest of what is going on in my life, and Sugar would have been just a curiosity until now.

The first week of the two week class went very well, dispite (or perhaps because of) our need to react each day to what happened and figure out from there what to do the next day. Here is some of what we learned / accomplished last week:

• The kids love to share Activities and seem to be very happy whenever they are let loose to share freely with the other kids in the class.
• Within a few days of meeting each other for the 1st time, our baker's dozen young folks have begun to develop a feeling of community in the classroom. Both my colleague, Dr. Ann Kennedy, and I strongly suspect that the peer to peer collaboration among the students made possible by Sugar is largely responsible for this.
• The mouse pads on our XOs are flaky, and having a mouse pad that didn't work was a show stopper. The level of frustration built quickly to the point where the kids started saying they didn't want to use the XOs.
• Once the UI works, they loved using their XOs. We attached USB mice, which solved the touchpad problem. There was an immediate and dramatic change in attitude of the users toward their learning devices.
• The favorite activity so far is Chat, which students get on whenever they can. We have built plenty of free exploration time into the class, so we can see what they do when left to their own devices. I am curious to see whether the enthusiasm for Chat wanes next week as the novelty wears off.
• Our own School Server (XS) made collaborating work smoothly. Network connection issues seem to have diminished precipitously once we had the XS on our local network.

I'll try to get back to blogging on a more regular basis. There has been so much going on that I haven't had the time to write about it, though I realize that is an important part of the process.

The Future of Educational Software is "Down Under"

There is something tremendously exciting going on down under. I just left the Free and Open Source Software in Education (FOSSED) conference in Bethel, Maine, where I have been blown away by two work shops on on-line learning tools from Australia and New Zealand. I was already familiar with Moodle, the on-line course management system. What blew me away were:

• Mahara - on-line ePortfolio system.
• LAMS - on-line learning activiy manager

When we first started dreaming about CanDo five years ago, we invisioned a system that could provide three things:

1. Transparance through explicit presentation of course competency goals.
2. On-line curriculum links to encourage students to engage in self learning.
3. On-line ePortfolios explicitly linked to course competencies as evidence of skills mastery.

We thought we were going to have to write all these things into CanDo itself, but it looks like an integrated SchoolTool, Mahara, and LAMS system could provide us with exactly what we had envisioned. Yay collaborative problem solving through free software!

What is interesting to me is that all of these pieces with the exception of SchoolTool are being developed in Australia and New Zealand. I definetly want to find out more about what is happening down there to make all this innovation happen.

Alan Kay was right a few years back when he said the computer revolution hadn't happened yet, but it is happening now, and it is a wonderful thing to be in the middle of it.

I can hardly wait for next September, when I'll start school with our SchoolTool / Muhara / Moodle / LAMS server.

Great Things Happening at FOSSED!

cI just left the morning presentation on Sugar on a Stick here in Maine at FOSSED. The small size (around 80 people), out of the way venue (Bethel, Maine -- an hour an a half from anywhere), and the high level of interest and dedication of the attendees make this special conference to attend.

I got to hang out with Walter Bender and Caroline Meeks of Sugar Labs. Walter was everything I had hoped he would be. Let me just say that when he listed Paulo Freire in the slide containing folks who inspire his work, I knew I was in the right place. Caroline has her own educational technology consulting business, Solution Grove. I'll be attending her other talk on Moodle and LAMS on Friday, but I already got to talk to her about SchoolTool.

There is work planned to integrate Sugar on a Stick with Moodle, so that when children connect their sticks to a machine at school, automatic backup and recover is made possibel through synchronization of their data with the moodle server. Given the work underway in California this Summer on Moodle / SchoolTool integration, I was struck by the possibilities for a powerful free software platform for schools combining SchoolTool, Moodle, Mahara, and Sugar.

Learning Inkscape

The 2nd edition of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python is progressing fast enough that I had to start thinking about improving the illustrations. Sphinx once again proved itself to be the tool of my dreams! I am able to create SVG illustrations using Inkscape, save them in Inkscapes own svg format, and link to them in the Sphinx source. The resulting html looks great! I spend the day in the Portland airport yesterday learning my way around Inkscape, and I've already completed the two illustrations from Chapter 1 of the book.

GASP Course and ThinkCSpy with Error Free Sphinx

Both the gasp-lessons and thinkcspy now contain sphinx source that builds without errors or warnings! With Filip's help, the index.html page of the gasp lessons now build the way I wanted them to.

I spent the day today working with Gregorio Inda, a Civil Engineer in Mexico who has been volunteering to translate the Python text book -- and now the gasp lessons as well -- into Spanish. The goal was to enable him to get his changes onto launchpad as he made them. To make this possible we needed to setup his Ubuntu Hardy box with:

• Python virtualenv
• bzr
• sphinx
• ssh connectivity to launchpad

The whole process wasn't bad, and was helped by the fact that Gregorio is a very bright guy, but it will soon be much easier when you can simply: sudo apt-get install python-sphinx and get sphinx version 0.6.1 or later. My assumption is this will be possible when Karmic is released next October.

While Gegorio is working on the Spanish version of the gasp-lessons, I've taken on the task of converting his Spanish version of thinkcspy from lore to reST. The html2rst.py script that I was using for the English version doesn't handle accents or ñ's, so I needed another tool. Fortunately, I found this on-line HTML to reST converter that seems to work pretty well.

Python Geek Fest

Since I will be heading to Maine for FOSSED on Tuesday, Monday is the last day for a few weeks that I'll be able to get together with folks working on Summer Python projects. So I've called for a "Python Geek Fest" on Monday at GCTAA. Jamie Boisture, Filip Sufitchi, Chris Carey, Paco Roque, and Howard Batiste have already confirmed, and we may get a few more folks who show up at the last minute. I plan to have even more work finished on the curriculum materials, and to helping Jamie get the new GASP in a form where a debian package can be built from it.

virtualenv 101

I'm working furiously on the Python textbook. The html2rst.py script I used to convert lore to reST did a pretty good job, but it now requires a human touch to get it looking right. I'm using Sphinx to build the web version, and last night I asked Filip Sufitchi if he could help me get the auto index generation working. He said he would, which is great news!

A quick review of how I setup a new python virtual environment so I could run the latest version of Sphinx and build the book from the reST source without messing up my Ubuntu installation:

• make sure the python-virtualenv package is installed
• $ virtualenv --no-site-packages PythonVEone
• $ source PythonVEone/bin/activate
• $ cd PythonVEone
• $ easy_install sphinx
• $ cp -r ../Ubuntu\ One/My\ Files/Projects/Sphinx/thinkcspy2/english2e/ thinkcspy2e
• $ thinkcspy2e
• $ sphinx-build source build

OK, back to work on the book...

Manos a la obra con XHTML

Manos a la obra con XHTML is now available on the web. Paco and Angela finished it yesterday evening, and I posted it last night. My son, Louis, is working on Manos a la obra con GIMP.

The 30 XOs are still stuck in customs, but Douglas is going to go in this week to see if we can finally get them out.

I'm working on converting How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python 2nd Ed. from Lore to Sphinx. The first pass of the converstion was automated, and made easy since Lore is HTML. Now I'm going through each chapter by hand fixing things that broke in the process.