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% About Sugar
%
%
What is Sugar?
==============
*"We like to think that a child's play is unconstrained—but when
children appear to feel joyous and free, this may merely hide from their
minds their purposefulness; you can see this more clearly when you
attempt to drag them away from their chosen tasks. For they are
exploring their worlds to see what's there, making explanations of what
those things are, and imagining what else could be; exploring,
explaining and learning are among a child's most purposeful urges and
goals. The playfulness of childhood is the most demanding teacher we
have. Never again in those children's lives will anything drive them to
work so hard." —Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine*
Sugar is a learning platform that reinvents how computers are used for
education. Collaboration, reflection, and discovery are integrated
directly into the user interface. Sugar promotes "studio thinking [^1]"
and "reflective practice [^2]". Through Sugar's clarity of design,
children and teachers have the opportunity to use computers on their own
terms. Students can reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and
content into powerful learning activities. Sugar's focus on sharing,
criticism, and exploration is grounded in the culture of free and
open-source software (FOSS).
 Sugar facilitates
sharing and collaboration. Children can write documents, share books and
pictures, or make music together with ease.
 There
are no files, folders, or applications. Children interact with
Activities. Activities includes an application, data, and history of the
interaction that can be used to resume and reflect on the child's work.
 Everything is saved
automatically. It is our goal that you will never lose your work.
Documents will eventually be synced with a network server, adding
additional protection.
 A Journal is used
for accessing data. The Journal is a diary of things that you make and
actions you take. It is a place to reflect upon your work.
 Sugar is free and
open-source software. Sugar is licensed under the GNU GPL; updates will
always respect the freedom of its users.
Note to parents and teachers The Sugar Philosophy
=================================================
Information is about nouns. Learning is about verbs. The Sugar user
interface differs from traditional user interfaces in that it is based
on both cognitive and social constructivism. We believe that learners
should engage in exploration and collaboration. The Sugar platform is
based on three defining human principles. These are the pillars of user
experience for learning:
- Everyone is a teacher and a learner.
- Humans are social beings.
- Humans are expressive.
Two principles define the Sugar platform:
- You learn through doing, so if you want to learn more, you want to
do more.
- Love is a better master than duty—you want people to engage in
things that are authentic to them, things that they love. Internal
motivation almost always trumps external motivations.
Three experiences characterize the Sugar platform:
- Sharing: The Sugar interface always shows the presence of other
learners. Collaboration is a first-order experience. Students and
teachers dialog with each other, support each other, critique each
other, and share ideas.
- Reflecting: Sugar uses a "Journal" to record each learner's
activity. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and
assessment of progress.
- Discovering: Sugar can accommodate a wide variety of users, with
different levels of skill in terms of reading, language, and
different levels of experience with computing. It is easy to
approach, yet it doesn't put an upper bound on personal expression.
One can peel away layers and go deeper and deeper, with no
restrictions.
Sugar is written in Python, an easy-to-learn interpreted language [^3].
This allows the direct appropriation of ideas in whatever realm the
learner is exploring; music, browsing, reading, writing, programming, or
graphics. The student can go further. They are not going to hit a wall.
They can, at every level, engage with and affect the very tools they are
using for their personal expression.
Throughout this manual we have added brief "Note to parents and
teachers" sections which explains the philosophy behind the Sugar
platform. We hope these sections help you guide your children and
students through the learning process.
Sugar Labs
==========
Sugar was designed for One Laptop per Child (OLPC), as part of an effort
to provide an opportunity for a quality education to every children
through the distribution of connected laptop computers, our most
powerful tools for expression. Sugar is the user interface used on the
OLPC XO laptop.
Sugar Labs is a non-profit foundation whose mission is to produce,
distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform. Sugar
Labs supports the community of educators and software developers who
want to extend the platform and who have been creating Sugar Activities.
Sugar is a community project. It is available under the open-source GNU
General Public License (GPL) and free to anyone who wants to use or
extend it.
:author:
> © Walter Bender 2006, 2008
>
> adam hyde 2006, 2007, 2008
>
> David Farning 2008
>
> Emily Kaplan 2008
>
> Janet Swisher 2008
>
> Luke Faraone 2008
>
> Rita Freudenberg 2008
>
> Rob Mason 2008
[^1]: Studio thinking is a term used to describe how visual arts
teachers teach and what visual arts students learn. The term is
detailed in Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts
Education. Studio thinking includes "studio structures":
demonstrations, projects, and critiques; as well as "studio habits
of mind": develop craft, engage and persist, envision, express,
observe, reflect, stretch and explore, and understand.the art world.
In the context of Sugar, studio thinking is applied not just to the
arts, but to all disciplines.
[^2]: Reflective practice is a concept introduced by Donald Schön in his
book The Reflective Practitioner. Reflective practice involves
students applying their own experiences to practice while being
mentored by domain experts. In the context of Sugar, the expert
could be a teacher, a parent, a community member, or a fellow
student.
[^3]: An interpreted language is a programming language whose
instructions are interpreted "on the fly" (or compiled to a virtual
machine code) as opposed to precompiled. The significant of
interpreted languages to the Sugar platform include: platform
independence, ease of debugging, ready access to source code, and
small program size. Python is a general-purpose, high-level
programming language. It emphasizes code readability and features a
minimalist syntax and comprehensive standard library.
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