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The Sugar Learning Platform provides great opportunities for children by focusing on collaboration and creative expression. Read more What is Sugar? The Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through rich-media expression. Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with the opportunity for a quality education—it is currently used by more than 750,000 children worldwide. Sugar provides the means to help people lead fulfilling lives through access to a quality education that is currently missed by so many. Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook, Sugar is now packaged as part of most major GNU/Linux distributions. Why Sugar? Sugar will engage even the youngest learner in the use of computation as a powerful “thing to think with.” They will quickly become proficient in using the computer as a tool to engage in authentic problem-solving. Sugar users develop skills that help them in all aspects of life. What is Sugar Labs? Sugar Labs is a non-profit foundation whose mission is to support the Sugar community of users and developers and establish regional, autonomous “Sugar Labs” around the world. What makes Sugar different? Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration: Children can write, share books, or make music together with a single mouse-click. There are no files, folders, or applications. Everything is saved automatically: The Sugar Journal makes it almost impossible to lose any data. The Journal records everything you do: It is a place to reflect upon and evaluate your work. Sugar runs on most computer hardware. Sugar is free software: It is written in Python and easily customized. Sugar is documented by its users: It is easy to use and teachers have created a wealth of pedagogical materials for it. What are the benefits of using Sugar? Hundreds of tools for discovery through exploring, expressing, and sharing: browsing, writing, etc. Built-in collaboration system: peer-to-peer learning; always-on support; and single-click sharing. Built-in tools for reflection; a built-in portfolio assessment tool that serves as a forum for discussion between children, parents, and teachers. A discoverable learning platform: it uses simple means to reach to complex ends. Designed for local appropriation: it has built-in tools for making changes and improvements and a growing global community of support. An emphasis on learning through doing and debugging: more engaged learners are able to tackle authentic problems. Available in a wide variety of forms: as part of GNU/Linux distributions; LiveCD, LiveUSB; and in a virtual machine. What are the Sugar advantages? Superior pedagogical framework Unique collaboration and journaling (evaluation) features Large & successful installed base with 100s of activities Large and committed community base (both developers and teachers) 24/7 support; training and workshop materials available Rapidly expanding teacher-driven development Easily localizable and customizable No licensing fees A global project: no single point of dependency or failure Great potential for local job creation The computer can help get new pedagogical approaches into the classroom. While getting computers into the hands of more children is undoubtedly of benefit, the question remains, “how does one maximize the learning that occurs?” A “learning-centric” approach The question often is framed in terms of teacher-centric versus child-centric methods. With Sugar, we strive for a “learning-centric” approach, where teachers mentor students as they engage with powerful ideas, “teaching less and learning more.” While we want to give children access to knowledge—through media such as electronic books, the world-wide web, and multimedia—we also want them to acquire this knowledge by putting it to use and engaging in critical dialog. With Sugar, we help learners acquire knowledge by giving them tools that make them consumers, critics, and creators of knowledge; Sugar welcomes them as members of a learning community. Learning is not a service—it’s a process of active appropriation. One-to-one computing initiatives—where children have access to computing “anytime” and “anywhere”—is changing in the way software developers and computer-makers think about the education industry. Cross-community collaboration between technologists and teachers ensures that the ideals of freedom, sharing, open critique, and transparency will be part of the interface to learning that touches children in the world’s classrooms. These ideas are embodied in the culture of free software, which is a powerful culture for learning. It is possible to instill in the education industry some of the culture, technology, and values of the open source movement. Such a transfer of culture could greatly enhance the education industry and its ability to engage teachers and students: empowering them with both the freedom to act and the freedom to be critical. Criticism of ideas is a powerful force in learning and in fostering economic development; unleashing that is an important part of the mission. Conventional wisdom suggests that teachers don’t want to learn (and change); to the contrary, teachers perhaps more than any other constituency know that the status quo is failing. Memos on learning by Marvin Minsky What makes Mathematics hard to learn? Drawbacks of Age-Based Segregation What’s wrong with the 50-minute hour Role Models, Mentors, and Imprimers and Thinking Thinking about Thinking about Ways to Think How do children acquire self-images? Finding Mentors in Network Communities Questioning General Education Education and Psychology Sugar is based on Constructionism. Like any good theory, Constructionism is accurate on some points, and needs further research on other areas. But what is Constructionism? Is it true? Is it effective? Seymour Papert, the father of constructionism, slyly points out that simply giving a definition would not be a Constructionist way to teach you. Instead he suggests ways in which you can experience what works and what doesn’t in current Constructionist programs. We can be a little more explicit, but the need for experience remains central. In Piaget’s Constructivist theory of child development and learning, based on decades of research with children, understanding is something a child constructs internally out of experience and previous understanding (which in some cases will be misunderstanding), when the child’s brain is sufficiently developed to support the ideas involved. In Constructionist education on computers, “Aha!” moments—in which a child (or adult) who has been working on a problem without insight suddenly gets it—are deliberately fostered. Alan Kay gives examples of ten-year-olds, with appropriate guidance on where and how to look, and appropriate computer software to assist them, discovering essential concepts of calculus, such as the laws of constant acceleration with their geometric realization and their application to physics. The symbol manipulation and formal proofs have to be delayed to a more appropriate developmental stage, of course. Much more common still are opportunities to work together—using Sugar’s collaboration capabilities—to construct something, and to explore all that is known and unknown and share the results. This is what Ivan Krstić told us captured the teachers in Latin America, who were no longer bound to the inadequate textbooks and teaching materials provided by the government. And after the teachers got it, the parents soon got it. Related links Seymour Papert and Constructionism Education Bibliographies A tool for analyzing hardware and network information Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox A basic collaborative calculator Collaborative discussion An entertaining game of logic Measure the distance between two laptops Learning, programming, & authoring environment Documentation and Help for Sugar Object and activity browser A debugging tool A timed maze game Visualize sound waves and other data with this virtual oscilloscope Compete against others to find matching pairs of images, sounds, or text View current lunar phase and eclipse information Simple paint activity Introductory Python programming environment Book & PDF reader Photo, video and audio capture Graphical cm/mm ruler and grids to take measurements of lengths and angles of objects An easy-to-learn, multimedia programming language A sound and music synthesizer A musical composition tool A basic noisemaking and music creation suite A virtual stage for collaborative musical perfomances A command line interface for young hackers Pseudo-Logo graphical programming language Offline English Wikipedia snapshot Word processor The Home view contains icons representing a child and his or her favorite activities, providing a space for starting or resuming activities. The Home view is a starting place for exploration. The Groups view represents the people closest to the child. From the Groups view, children interact with friends and can join their shared activities. The Neighborhood view displays all the computers within a child’s connected community, and their shared activities. The Neighborhood view is a place for discovering new things and making new friends. The Journal is an automated diary of everything a child does with his or her laptop. Children use the journal to organize work and revisit a past project. Teacher and parents use the journal to assess a child’s progress. Source: The Ceibal Project Browse is a simple Web application that allows children to access the Internet and share links among their friends. Write is a text editing activity featuring straightforward tools and a simple interface. It provides an easy way for children to write a story, craft a poem, or complete an essay, as well as more advanced features like image insertion, table creation, and layout operations. It also features collaborative real-time editing, so a group of children can work together to edit text easily and seamlessly. The Paint activity provides a canvas for a child’s creative expression. Children can draw free-form images with a paintbrush and pencil, and use the dedicated toolbar to play and experiment with shapes. Text support, image import functionality, and an interactive placement system give children limitless ways to explore their creativity. Memorize is the classic matching-pairs memory game with a twist: each card can consist of any multimedia object, such as images, sounds and text. The memory game allows children to play with existing card sets, as well as create new ones themselves. Squeak Etoys was inspired by LOGO, PARC-Smalltalk, Hypercard, and starLOGO. It is a media-rich authoring environment with a simple, powerful scripted object model. Turtle Art is an activity with a Logo-inspired graphical “turtle” that draws colorful art based on Scratch-like snap-together visual programming elements. Pippy teaches Python programming by providing access to Python code samples and a fully interactive Python interpreter. TamTam Edit is a page driven event sequencer featuring a powerful music generator, a colorful and intuitive graphical interface to create, modify and organize notes on five virtual “tracks”, a palette of close to a hundred sounds and a music construction model that allows virtually limitless variations in all musical styles. TamTam SynthLab is an advanced application for older children who are ready to venture into sophisticated sound design. SynthLab is a physics lab and sound synthesizer modeled on Max/MSP. Sugar supports sharing and collaboration. Using Sugar, teachers easily share things with their class: books and bookmarks; materials and activities. Using Sugar, children collaboratively browse the web. They share links directly within the collaborative browsing sessions. Sugar comes with many core activities, including Write, a simple-to-use, collaborative word processor. “Sugar on a Stick” gives children access to their Sugar on any computer—they only need a USB key. At home or the library, they use the USB key on any computer to access their work. In the Sugar Neighborhood view, children see their connected friends. Children are shown clustered around their current activities; they can join each other’s activities. The Sugar Paint activity provides a canvas for children to express themselves creatively by drawing. The Sugar Memorize activity is a game about finding matching pairs of words, images, sounds—even videos. Memorize allows you to create new games yourself. The Sugar Journal records everything a child does using Sugar. There is no need to remember to save files. The Journal allows children to focus entirely on their activities. Using Sugar, children can Chat and exchange objects—pictures, games, writing—with their connected friends. Illustrated by Dongyun Lee / http://www.dongyunlee.com Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection. Children develop skills that help them in all aspects of life. Learn more about how you can try Sugar. The Sugar Learning Platform The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform is a revolutionary new approach to technology and learning. With Sugar, your children will engage in exploring knowledge, expressing themselves through writing, drawing, video—even programming the computer. Working collaboratively, they can reflect upon their work and use Sugar to create a portfolio of their accomplishments. With the Sugar Learning Platform, the age-old question “What did you do in school today?” can be retired. Sugar maintains a diary (the Journal) of what they make (nouns), how they make it (verbs), and with whom they are collaborating (proper nouns). You can sit down with your child and walk through the Journal to review progress and leave comments for the teacher. Activities Sugar comes with the usual collection of activities: a web browser, an ebook reader, a multimedia player, a word processor, and lots of games. It also comes with a rich collection of music tools, both for playing and composing music, and programming tools that are accessible to child as young as 4-years old, but interesting enough to keep a teenager engaged. A hallmark of Sugar is its simplicity—even pre-schoolers can use the Sugar basics—while putting no upper bound on the complexity of expression to which your child can reach. Collaboration Collaboration is fundamental in Sugar. Your child can collaborate with friends, family, and classmates—playing games, chatting, sharing bookmarks, and helping each other with homework. Try Sugar You can try Sugar by downloading it to a USB key and then using it to boot your desktop or laptop computer. (Sugar will not change anything on your computer—it uses the USB instead of your harddisk.) You can introduce Sugar to your child’s school using USB sticks as well. With Sugar, children grow into confident, joyful learners and realize their unlimited potentials. Imagine a classroom where instruction is complimented by learners engaged in self-discovery; where collaboration, expression, and reflection are integrated directly into the learning experience. Through the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform, students appropriate knowledge by engaging in activities that are authentic to them. With Sugar, your students at all skill levels can explore any curriculum goal more deeply. Your students will learn and they will learn to learn. Your students will enjoy learning more and they will improve in regard to traditional metrics such as reading comprehension. And you will enjoy mentoring them and learning along side them. Features Sugar is easy to learn: teachers and students discover how to use Sugar through exploration and collaboration—together, you learn by doing. Sugar can accommodate a wide variety of students, 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 a student’s personal expression. The Sugar interface always shows a students connected friends. Students chat with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas. Activities such as peer editing are just one “mouse-click” away. Sugar uses a “Journal” to record each student’s activities: both what they make and how they make it. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress—a portfolio that can be shared with teachers, parents, and the student as they progress through grade levels. Pedagogy Based upon 40+ years of educational research at Harvard and MIT, Sugar promotes “studio thinking” through demonstrations, projects, and critiques, as well as “studio habits of mind”, by developing craft, engagement, persistence, expression, observation, reflection, and exploration. In the context of Sugar, studio thinking is applied not just to the arts, but to all disciplines. 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. At the same time, Sugar is flexible; it works coherently with the wide variety of instructional frameworks, deepening the student’s learning experience. Sugar also provides access to internet learning resources. While Sugar is designed for elementary school classrooms, it will hold the interest of middle schoolers as well. Getting started Sugar is a great way to augment your classroom: it is simple; it is powerful; it is boundless; and it is free! Almost one-million children and tens of thousands of teachers around the world are using Sugar. Learn more about Sugar and how you can be part of the Sugar revolution. A learning and software-development community The Sugar development platform is available under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it. Sugar Labs, part of the Software Freedom Conservancy (a non-profit foundation to produce and distribute and support the use of free software), serves as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications. Education goals Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community. Thus Sugar Labs is working with educators around the world to focus on these learning challenges: To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners everywhere To explore and share best practices To provide a forum for discussion and support for technology for learning To provide a mechanism for evaluation and dissemination of results Community goals Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. Sugar Labs would like to help community members start projects that help sustain and grow the Sugar technology and learning communities: To provide local and regional technical and pedagogical support To create new learning activities and pedagogical practice To provide localization and internationalization of software, content, and documentation To provide integration and customization services Education team The mission of the education team is to explain why Sugar is an ideal platform for learning, and to provide guidance and feedback to those who are working on how Sugar enhances learning. Learn more Deployment team The mission of the deployment team is to voice the needs of Sugar deployments to the Sugar community, to find ways to support those needs, to organize forums for the exchange of experiences between Sugar users and Sugar developers, and to build local Sugar Labs organizations worldwide. Learn more Development team The mission of the development team is to build and maintain the core Sugar environment. This includes specifying and implementing new features in conjunction with the Design team, fixing bugs as they are found by the Testing team and the Sugar community, and generally making Sugar awesome in all ways. Learn more Design team The mission of the design team is to make Sugar beautiful, elegant, and highly functional. Learn more BugSquad The mission of the BugSquad is to be responsive to incoming bug reports. The Squad needs to triage the bugs and work towards a solution with the reporters and the developers until the issue is solved. Therefore it has an important role in making the end product better and can be seen as the liaison between testers/users and developers. Learn more Documentation team The mission of the documentation team is to provide the Sugar community with high quality documentation, including user manuals, programming references, and tutorials. Learn more Marketing team The mission of the marketing team is to articulate the benefits of Sugar (simplify), to promote these benefits as widely as possible (amplify), and to recruit volunteers to improve the Sugar experience. Learn more Oversight board The mission of the oversight board is to ensure that the Sugar Labs community has clarity of purpose and the means to collaborate in achieving its goals. Learn more Wiki team The mission of the wiki team is to maintain the Sugar Labs wiki, and to help the Sugar Labs teams and the greater educational community to collaborate effectively. Learn more Infrastructure team The mission of the infrastructure team is to keep the project humming along nicely, by maintaining and developing Sugar Labs’ collaboration and public-facing infrastructure. Learn more The deployment team is in charge of answering the question: How can Sugar Labs facilitate the distribution and support of deployments of Sugar all around the world? The Sugar Labs mission provides an answer, namely to voice the needs of Sugar deployments to the Sugar community, to find ways to support those needs, to organize forums for the exchange of experiences between Sugar users and Sugar developers, and to build local Sugar Labs organizations worldwide. A local Sugar Lab would: Adapt the technology and pedagogy to an area’s culture and resources (e.g. developing activities and content specific to a region) Help translate Sugar to the local language(s) Support Sugar deployments in area schools Create a local community devoted to the Sugar Labs principles, making Sugar more open and sustainable Provide for communication between the local communities and the global Sugar Labs community Develop Local content and software that can be used not only for local purposes but also for the overall community Host, co-host or partner in the organization of conferences, workshops, talks and meetings related to the use or development of Sugar Organizational structure A distributed project—we pluralized the name Sugar Labs deliberately—where there is a local sense of ownership and associated entrepreneurship feels like the right course for us as an organization. Sugar Labs “central” is the community itself, which would be responsible for setting clear goals and maintaining any necessary infrastructure needed by the project as a whole, while the regional labs would use the own means to make Sugar relevant to their local communities. Conditions for success What is the “business model” for a successful Sugar Lab? Some conditions for ensuring success might be: A university connection as a local human resource A local pilot user group from which to learn A local passion or sub-goal that provides a rationale for the work Bi-directional communication with the global Sugar community and other Sugar Labs A sustainable and well-defined entrepreneurship model A program to reach out to local free-software community and local industry Join Sugar The Sugar community is individuals, teams, and relationships. We all share one thing in common: we want to improve how computers are used in education. If you want to take an active hand in making Sugar even better, there are many ways you can help. What role do you want to fill? Content writer Description of this role: Communicate through words. Skills you possess or want to learn: Writing, editing, grammar (wordsmith), technical, explaining complex ideas well, teaching, DocBook, XML, Wiki markup, technical knowledge (specific and general) Teams associated with this role: Documentation Team, Marketing Team, Wiki Team Tasks typical in this role: Guides, how-tos, FAQs, knowledgebase (kbase), articles, marketing material, process/methodology docs, editing, release notes Designer Description of this role: Communicate through images. Skills you possess or want to learn: Inkscape, GIMP, OO.org, design, usability/interaction Teams associated with this role: Design Team Tasks typical in this role: Conference banners/flyers, Materials (t-shirts, CD covers, etc.), OS art (wallpapers, themes), publication design, Web design, icons, banners, mockups, stylesheets Developer Description of this role: Communicate through code. Skills you possess or want to learn: Python, C, RPM/Packaging, Bugfiling Teams associated with this role: Development Team, Testing Team, Infrastructure Team Tasks typical in this role: Test/break Sugar, design & build Sugar, file bugs, build packages, code for OS, develop new features, develop new activities People Person Description of this role: Communicate through one-on-one contact. Skills you possess or want to learn: People skills, event organization, customer service/support, enthusiasm Teams associated with this role: Marketing Team Tasks typical in this role: Conferences, local events, organizing events, Sugar Labs forum/IRC help/support tech, send out media/spread Sugar Translator Description of this role: Communicate through interpretation. Skills you possess or want to learn: English, Non-English native language, technical knowledge, diff, PO, translation, babel tool (kbabel, etc.) Teams associated with this role: Wiki Team Tasks typical in this role: Marketing, docs, websites, application translation, localization Web Developer or Administrator Description of this role: Communicate through the World Wide Web. Skills you possess or want to learn: Python, XML/XHTML, CSS, XSL/XSLT, TurboGears, Web app development, Linux system administration Teams associated with this role: Wiki Team Tasks typical in this role: Website pages, applications, stylesheets, toolchain, design, scripts, templates index about features education constructionism activities gallery contributors teams deployment getting involved learners parents teachers Get Sugar Get started Get help Get involved Submit bugs Request features Activities/software Get the source Sugar Labs BugSquad Deployment Design Development Documentation Education Infrastructure Marketing Oversight Wiki News Planet Local Labs Donate FAQ Governance Recent Changes Wiki help