(photo by Sugar Desktop)

One of the most exciting sessions at the K-12 Open Minds conference was on Sugar by Walter Bender himself!

Background: Sugar is the operating system that ships on the XO (One Laptop per Child) laptop.  It is actually a varient of Linux and can run on any computer.

I had had various conversations with people about School Key so the room was primed to think about Sugar on a Stick, that is giving students bootable USB Keys loaded with the Sugar operating system.

 The idea really captured the imagination of the room.  Most of the people I spoke with at the conference saw the potential advantages of School Key with a standard Linux distributions.  But Sugar for young (probably K-3) students is far more exciting.  Sugar doesn't look like Windows, its is clearly designed for younger students and is clearly designed to promote collaboration, exploration and knowledge construction.

A huge A-Hah moment for me was when I realized how collaboration would work in a non-XO environment.  

On Sugar you have a "Neighborhood" view that shows you other Sugar users in your Neighborhood.  When I played with my XO I assumed this had to do with physical distance.  Your "Neighborhood" is actually defined by what Jabber server you are hooked up to.  To take advantage of this when we create the USB Keys we will put each school on thier own Jabber server.  This means when students use their Sugar School Key from any computer, school, home or library, they will be able to see and collaborate with other students from their school!

I am hoping to get a test distribution next week that I can test at the Shaw School on Friday. I will be looking to see if we have the same stability problems we had with SLAX.  The XO only has 256 MB RAM and 1GB drive, so I have high hopes for good performance on the existing Shaw computers.