The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software.Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Available in 25 languages, Sugar’s Activities are used every school day by almost two-million children in more than forty countries.Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook, Sugar runs on most computers. Sugar is free/libre and open-source software. Try it with a child today.more information for learners / parents / teachers / contributorsSugar on a StickThe Sugar User InterfaceWhat is Sugar?The Sugar Learning Platform is a computer environment composed of Activities designed to help children from 5 to 12 years of age learn together 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 nearly one-million children worldwide speaking 25 languages in over 40 countries. Sugar provides the means to help people lead fulfilling lives through access to a quality education that is currently missed by so many.Runs on most PCsOriginally developed for the revolutionary One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook, Sugar can run on almost any PC, including small netbooks, older and donated machines, and new energy efficient computers with limited processing power. Sugar is now packaged as part of most major GNU/Linux distributions and is compatible with recent Macs using virtualization. A liveCD which does not touch the existing hard disk installation is available; a liveUSB stick which can run on most PCs is under active development.Why Sugar?Sugar sets aside the traditional “office-desktop” metaphor and, through its Activities, engages even the youngest learners in the use of computation as a powerful “thing to think with.” They quickly become proficient in using the computer as a tool to engage in authentic problem-solving. Moreover, most Sugar Activities can be shared by learners between machines—children learn as a group, not as a collection of individual users. Sugar users develop skills that help them in all aspects of life.What is Sugar Labs?Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven, non-profit organization, is a member
project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The mission of Sugar Labs is to support the Sugar community of users and developers and establish regional, autonomous “Sugar Labs” around the world to help children “learn how to learn” by tailoring Sugar to local languages and curricula.Sugar on an Intel Classmate PCWhat makes Sugar different?Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration: Children can write, share books, or make music together with a single mouse-click.Activities, not applications..Automatic backup of Activity work; no worrying about files or folders. Sugar’s 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, including slower machines.Sugar is free software: It is written in the modern Python language and easily customized.Sugar is documented by its users: It is easy to use and teachers worldwide have created a wealth of pedagogical materials for it.JournalWhat 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.The Journal is 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. 25 languages are currently available.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 frameworkUnique collaboration and journaling (evaluation) featuresLarge & successful installed base with hundreds of activitiesLarge and committed community base (both developers and teachers)24/7 community support; training and workshop materials availableRapidly expanding teacher-driven developmentEasily localizable and customizableFree open source software: no licensing feesA global project: no single point of dependency or failureGreat potential for local job creationUruguayan school children in a Chat ActivityWriteThe 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” approachThe 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.The free software cultureThese ideas are embodied in the culture of free software, which is a powerful culture for learning. Educators are discovering the culture, technology, and values of the open source movement which engages both 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. Teachers are learners too and Sugar provides a way for teachers and students to share.Memos on learning by Marvin Minsky
What makes Mathematics hard to learn?Drawbacks of Age-Based SegregationWhat’s wrong with the 50-minute hourRole Models, Mentors, and Imprimers and ThinkingThinking about Thinking about Ways to ThinkHow do children acquire self-images?Finding Mentors in Network CommunitiesQuestioning General EducationEducation and PsychologySugar 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, built-in to its Activities—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.Seymour PapertRelated linksSeymour Papert and ConstructionismEducation BibliographiesActivities are what make Sugar unique. Many Activities can be shared between learners with a single click. Click on an icon below to learn more about each Activity. Download these Activities, and many more, in our Activities section.Journal
Object and activity browser
Read
Book & PDF reader
Write
Word processor
Help
Documentation and Help for Sugar
Chat
Collaborative discussion
Browse
Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox
Distance
Measure the distance between two laptops
Etoys
Learning, programming, & authoring environment
Calculate
A basic collaborative calculator
Turtle Art
Pseudo-Logo graphical programming language
Maze
A timed maze game
Memorize
Compete against others to find matching pairs of images, sounds, or text
Moon
View current lunar phase and eclipse information
Pippy
Introductory Python programming environment
Paint
Simple paint activity
Scratch
An easy-to-learn, multimedia programming language
Ruler
Graphical cm/mm ruler and grids to take measurements of lengths and angles of objects
Record
Photo, video and audio capture
Implode
An entertaining game of logic
WikiBrowse English
Offline English Wikipedia snapshot
TamTam SynthLab
A sound and music synthesizer
TamTam Edit
A musical composition tool
TamTam Mini
A basic noisemaking and music creation suite
TamTam Jam
A virtual stage for collaborative musical perfomances
Measure
Visualize sound waves and other data with this virtual oscilloscope
Terminal
A command-line interface for young programmers
Analyze
A tool for analyzing hardware and network information
Log
A debugging tool
Sugar User InterfaceHomeGroupsNeighborhoodJournalChatBrowseWriteDrawMemorizeEtoysTurtle ArtPippyTamTam EditTamTam SynthLabSugar on an Intel Classmate PCHome
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.
Groups
The Groups view represents the people closest to the child. From the Groups view, children interact with friends and can join their shared activities.
Neighborhood
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.
Journal
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.
Uruguayan school children in a Chat Activity
Source: The Ceibal Project
Browse
Browse is a simple Web application that allows children to access the Internet and share links among their friends.
Write
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.
Paint
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
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.
Etoys
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 program created by a Uruguayan schoolchild
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
Pippy teaches Python programming by providing access to Python code samples and a fully interactive Python interpreter.
TamTam Edit
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
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 on an Intel Classmate PC
Photo: Mike Lee
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 PlatformThe award-winning Sugar Learning Platform is a revolutionary new approach to technology and learning. With Sugar’s Activities, 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.The JournalWith the Sugar Learning Platform, the age-old question “What did you do in school today?” takes on new meaning. 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.ActivitiesThe heart of Sugar is its Activities—not applications in the traditional sense, but ways of working and thinking together. Curious children can view the source code of Activities and even try their hand at programming. More traditional Activities such as a web browser, an ebook reader, a multimedia player, and a word processor, open a window to the Web (if connectivity is available), allow dozens or even hundreds of books to be stored and read, rich content to be played back, documents to be composed. Kids love games, and Sugar has several which aid learning and build dexterity. Sugar comes with a rich collection of music Activities, 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.CollaborationCollaboration 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 SugarYou can try Sugar by downloading it to a CD or 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 hard disk.) 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.Turtle Art program created by a Uruguayan schoolchildTamTam SynthLabEtoysImagine 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.FeaturesSugar 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.PedagogyBased 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 startedSugar 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.Uruguayan school children in a Chat ActivityJournalA learning and software-development communityThere are many ways you can take an active hand in making Sugar even better. Financial contributions large and small are greatly appreciated and will be used to support grassroots learning innovations and face-to-face meetings between developers and educators. The community is organized into teams. Please join a team in order to help us expand our educational, technical, and community goals.Education goalsSugar 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 everywhereTo explore and share best practicesTo provide a forum for discussion and support for technology for learningTo provide a mechanism for evaluation and dissemination of resultsTechnical goalsSugar supports the notions that learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.” We focus on solving the challenges that are relevant to these distinct aspects of the interface:To make it “simple” to share Sugar activitiesTo create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platformsTo make it “simple” to write Sugar activitiesTo make Sugar activities even more secureCommunity goalsSugar 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 supportTo create new learning activities and pedagogical practiceTo provide localization and internationalization of software, content, and documentationTo provide integration and customization servicesEducation teamThe 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 moreDeployment teamThe 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 moreDevelopment teamThe 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 moreDesign teamThe mission of the design team is to make Sugar beautiful, elegant, and highly functional. Learn moreBugSquadThe 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 moreDocumentation teamThe mission of the documentation team is to provide the Sugar community with high quality documentation, including user manuals, programming references, and tutorials. Learn moreMarketing teamThe 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 moreOversight boardThe 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 moreWiki teamThe 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 moreInfrastructure teamThe 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 moreThe 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 schoolsCreate a local community devoted to the Sugar Labs principles, making Sugar more open and sustainableProvide for communication between the local communities and the global Sugar Labs communityDevelop Local content and software that can be used not only for local purposes but also for the overall communityHost, co-host or partner in the organization of conferences, workshops, talks and meetings related to the use or development of SugarOrganizational structureA 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 successWhat is the “business model” for a successful Sugar Lab? Some conditions for ensuring success might be:A university connection as a local human resourceA local pilot user group from which to learnA local passion or sub-goal that provides a rationale for the workBi-directional communication with the global Sugar community and other Sugar LabsA sustainable and well-defined entrepreneurship modelA program to reach out to local free-software community and local industryJoin SugarThe 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 writerDescription 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 TeamTasks typical in this role: Guides, how-tos, FAQs, knowledgebase (kbase), articles, marketing material, process/methodology docs, editing, release notesDesignerDescription of this role: Communicate through images.Skills you possess or want to learn: Inkscape, GIMP, OO.org, design, usability/interactionTeams associated with this role: Design TeamTasks typical in this role: Conference banners/flyers, Materials (t-shirts, CD covers, etc.), OS art (wallpapers, themes), publication design, Web design, icons, banners, mockups, stylesheetsDeveloperDescription of this role: Communicate through code.Skills you possess or want to learn: Python, C, RPM/Packaging, BugfilingTeams associated with this role: Development Team, Testing Team, Infrastructure TeamTasks typical in this role: Test/break Sugar, design & build Sugar, file bugs, build packages, code for OS, develop new features, develop new activitiesPeople PersonDescription of this role: Communicate through one-on-one contact.Skills you possess or want to learn: People skills, event organization, customer service/support, enthusiasmTeams associated with this role: Marketing TeamTasks typical in this role: Conferences, local events, organizing events, Sugar Labs forum/IRC help/support tech, send out media/spread SugarTranslatorDescription 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 TeamTasks typical in this role: Marketing, docs, websites, application translation, localizationWeb Developer or AdministratorDescription 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 administrationTeams associated with this role: Wiki TeamTasks typical in this role: Website pages, applications, stylesheets, toolchain, design, scripts, templatesSugar (wiki)
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