Ceibal '09

In the days 7th and 8th of this month took place in Montevideo the First International Event on Experiences about the Ceibal Plan, with the objective of sharing the experience gained during the first years of the implementation in Uruguay of the OLPC initiative, with the name of Plan Ceibal. On the afternoon of the second day, some schools displayed the work they had done with the XOs.

Project Rayuela and LATU were kind enough to invite me to assist, which has been an unforgettable experience for me. The plan was that after the event I would stay for one week discussing with the software team at LATU how they can work most profitably with the Sugar community upstream, will talk about this in a later post.

I still can hardly believe that it has been the second time that I have been close to a child learning with Sugar, and the previous one was more than 2 years ago, when attended FISL in the company of J5 and Jim Gettys. We visited then a school where the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul was conducting a pilot with very early prototypes of the XO and Sugar.

Visit to the school Luciana de Abreu

This time was very different because we were seeing the results of at least one year of continuous work with Sugar, something that was happening in the mainstream of that society, backed by the government, the families, several volunteer organizations, and the primary education system.

Students displaying their work with Scratch

Though I was ecstatic seeing each school presenting their work, I felt a bit sorry for the developers and non-developers that made that possible with their work but received very little feedback to date on the actual use of it. I have plans to improve that.

Learning geometry with Turtle Art

It has been a very enlightening and encouraging experience, wish all my colleagues at Sugar Labs could have this opportunity as well in the near future. The last 2 years have been pretty hard for the Sugar developers, always having to stand the never ending stream of naysayers, even from OLPC itself, and with the last year having to live off our savings. I'm very proud that we have managed to stand firm on our believe that the best GUI for learning hadn't been invented yet and that we could contribute something valuable to the mission of giving more learning opportunities to children around the world, specially those from less favoured backgrounds.

After having seen children and teachers involved together in learning with Sugar, I can finally say that we were right. Though of course, this is just starting...

The program of the event can be found here and I expect that soon will appear video recodings of the sessions and of the school presentations. Will post here when they are made public. Also will post soon about the week that followed, in which I had the luck of being a small part of a process in which an organization (and in some sense, a country) moves from being a consumer of FOSS to being a full rights member of the FOSS community.

Thanks to J5 and Gonzalo Odiard for the photographs.

Can GNOME change the world?

Maybe, after all ;)

Almost one year ago I blogged here about ongoing work in adding file transfer capabilities to Sugar. That work was prompted by some Collabora employees pinging us about this new feature in the Telepathy spec, they were helpful when implementing the client side in Sugar and also surprised us by implementing support in telepathy-gabble just in time for Fedora 11.

Since then that feature got released in Sugar 0.84 and refined in 0.86.

And last week, Jose I. Icaza from TECno.tzotzil blogged about how small children in remote schools in the Mexican region of Chiapas are exchanging their writings across the network and teaching their teachers to do the same, using Telepathy.

Don't know about you, but I find amazing that the time I spend hacking on something cool can also have a positive impact on the education of children all around the world, specially in the poorest and most remote areas.

If you would like to use your hacking skills to improve education and wonder how, please refer to this post.

Free education as in free speech

It's great to see more and more fellow FLOSS enthusiasts realizing both the impact of education in our goals and the importance of free software in improving our society, this time by impacting children's education.

Celebrating tomorrow's Software Freedom Day, the Free Software Foundation and Sugar Labs are announcing a partnership to improve learning with free software:

http://www.fsf.org/news/sugar-labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org/press

If you are a software developer concerned about the challenges that our global society faces and think that early education is part of the solution, please consider contributing to Sugar Labs. You don't even need to get your hands dirty in Sugar code if you don't wish to, there's plenty of code elsewhere in the stack that will benefit our young users, for example:

* Improve the rendering performance of librsvg for the kind of icons used in Sugar,

* Add tile-based rendering to Evince #303365,

* Improve GObject-Introspection support in PyGObject (what used to be called PyBank),

* Improve startup performance and memory usage of Python by reducing eager loading of module dependencies,

* Improve Linux' handling of low memory conditions in userspace,

* Package Sugar for your favorite distro,

* Improve the infrastructure for Live USB images in your favorite distro,

* Spread this call for help.

Of course, if you prefer to help us develop the Sugar shell and its activities we'll be happy to help you put your skills on use. Just say hi in #sugar @ Freenode or in sugar-devel.

And as any other FOSS project, we also need testers, bug triagers, designers, web developers, technical writers, you name it.

Writing Sugar activities with PyQt

At David Boddie's suggestion, have dedicated part of this weekend to explore how well PyQt can be used to write Sugar activities. The results have been very satisfying, I would say thanks to python's flexibility and to the Sugar activity architecture, an excellent work of Marco Pesenti Gritti.

So I got something that looks and behaves similarly to activities compliant to the Sugar Human Interface Guidelines, with the following exceptions:

* No combobox for selecting the sharing mode.

* Some theme quirks were fixed with a custom stylesheet, I think these should be treated as bugs in either QGtkStyle or the Sugar Gtk theme. Or if QGtkStyle is not up to this job, we would need to implement a new QStyle. Couldn't workaround all of the issues in the stylesheet.

* No palettes at all. Hope implementing them in Qt will be much less work than it has been in Gtk+.

* The XCursor theme is not picked up, need to investigate further.

* Some Gtk stuff is still used, I think PyQt activities shouldn't use Gtk+ at all for better memory usage and startup performance.

Good news is that I have reimplemented good part of the activity API in PyQt quite quickly, but we may want to design a better API learning from the mistakes of the past.

Now, let's let the Sugar platform get flooded of KDE Edu activities :)

Update:

Code: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/hellow-world-qt/repos/mainline

Screenshot:

On Negroponte's omelettes

For the people who aren't following closely the Sugar project (specially my GNOME friends), if you read in certain media that Negroponte thinks that Sugar is OLPC's biggest mistake, you may want to know that some confusion has arisen from his badly-chosen words.

Negroponte is referring by the name Sugar to the whole OS image that ships in their machines, something different to what everybody else refers by Sugar, even OLPC's own Support FAQ.

No need to extend on this myself because others have explained better the gory details:

http://radian.org/notebook/nonsense-omelet
http://gregdek.livejournal.com/52052.html

Something I can add to those posts though is that OLPC management tried once before to refer to the whole software they made as "Sugar" at one occasion before. It was when the community was outraged at the company's approximation to MS, they announced that their commitment to Sugar was still strong and proof of that was that they had doubled the resources available to Sugar.

What in fact happened was that they hired several people to work on the base system, but the people working on the real Sugar were still the same, sad, 2 and a half people.

Given that the Sugar community is working in the benefit of OLPC's customers, I wonder why Negroponte cannot think a bit more before making such "courageous" statements.

Telepathy Developer's Manual

I'm skimming through it right now and this is REALLY good stuff:

http://people.collabora.co.uk/~davyd/telepathy-book/

Ideally, 90% of Sugar activity authors shouldn't need to get to work much with telepathy directly, because they most likely only want to share a data structure and interchange some messages or signals.

But for the people doing activities such as Chat or VideoChat, implementing collaboration frameworks such as Groupthink or messing with the presence service in Sugar, this will be invaluable and will hopefully lower the floor for new contributors.

Thanks, Collabora!

Sugar, usando Software libre para aprender

Por casualidad tropece con este articulo excelentemente escrito por Maria del Pilar Saenz Rodriguez: Sugar, usando Software libre para aprender. Explica muy bien la importancia del software libre en educacion y como encaja Sugar ahi.

Desafortunadamente se necesita Flash para acceder al pdf, esta disponible en la caja "My shared files" en la misma pagina. Y claro, seria muy bueno que Pilar alias befana sindicara su blog en planet.sugarlabs.org.

Tambien seria estupendo tener una traduccion al ingles para la gente de Sugar Labs que lo promueve a nivel internacional, voluntarios?