This is a repost of a wiki page I wrote on Sugar Labs. Please check there for the latest version:
- USB based boot have and advantage because expands the Sugar experience home and to other computers outside the school.
- Thin Client type environments use fewer computers in a computer lab setting and save energy.
Can we get the best of both worlds?
Walter Bender writes a weeks wrap up of Sugar. This was included in last weeks:
=== Sugar Digest ===
2. Sugar on a stick: Caroline Meeks and I visited a Boston public school to discuss with them the possibility of piloting a USB Sugar deployment, where the children would use USB sticks to boot Sugar at school and at home, using whatever computers are available. This deployment enables a school to use Sugar without making an upfront investment in new computers. It could be a very cost-effective approach to bootstrapping Sugar communities.
-walter
Edward Cherlin wrote:
What is Sugar?
Learning is not a service--it is a process of active appropriation.
The best introduction is to see it. There is a good video here: http://interdimensionmedia.com/scratch/MoMA/demo_small.html
With Sugar we take a learning-centric approach, where teachers mentor students as they engage with powerful ideas, teaching less and learning more. We give children access to knowledge--through media such as electronic books, the Web, and multimedia. We also skew the odds toward the appropriation of knowledge by putting it to use and engaging in critical dialog. That does not happen by itself; we facilitate appropriation by providing collaborative tools that put learners in the roles of consumer, critic, and creator within a learning community.
Sugar provides the collaborative experience we associate with the Internet directly into the classroom using a peer-to-peer network; children peer-edit with the word processor, share variables with the calculator, share bookmarks with the browser; sharing a photo or video or story is just one mouse-click away. Through its Journal, children share with parents and teachers what they are learning. Sugar enables unbounded exploration: simple tools to explore complex ideas across a
diverse set of domains: numeracy, literacy, rich media, and computation. Sugar empowers teachers and children with the freedom to act and the freedom to be critical.
Features and benefits of Sugar:
* comes with hundreds of tools for discovery through exploring, expressing, and sharing: Web browsing; reading; chatting; playing movies and music; playing games; word processing; reflecting and assessment; creating graphics; creating rich media; and programming.
* collaboration features sharing with or without Internet access; benefits include peer-to-peer learning; always-on support; and "single-click" sharing.
* built-in tools for reflection: features include an auto-generated journal (work is auto-saved and can be annotated/tagged); benefits include a portfolio assessment tool, a place of reflection, and a forum for discussion between children, their parents, and their teachers.
* features a scalable, "discoverable" interaction model that is iconic and discoverable through hover menus; benefits include that you can progress using simple means to reach to complex ends.
* designed for local appropriation: it features free software, a view-source mechanism, and built-in tools for making changes and improvements; benefits include a growing global community of support.
* emphasis on learning through doing and debugging: benefits include a more engaged learner able to tackle authentic problems.
The best introduction is to see it. There is a good video here: http://interdimensionmedia.com/scratch/MoMA/demo_small.html
Schools create an "activity pack" that meets their needs. (An
activity pack is a selection of Sugar activities--typically 30-40
learning programs.) There are hundreds of activities available. Some
highlights include:
Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is Poverty.
My topic choice is the advantages of Sugar on a Stick in providing education and computing to urban poor students.
Let's talk about Sasha, a fictional 2nd Grader in Dorchester.
Sasha's school uses a USB device in the form of a bracelet. There are different colors and different words printed on them. Sasha has a Yellow one that says "Knowledge is Power"; it also has a logo and in smaller print "Acme Corp Cares about Kids". Acme pays for the USB bracelets and the school server. They are only $5 each in bulk and many schools choose not to have advertising but Sasha's school feels that is money the school can spend elsewhere and the connection to the Acme Corp has also lead to Acme Employees volunteering once a month to read to the kids.
Today for $47 you can get a 8GB USB key that includes a sensor for verifying your fingerprint.
The drivers would have to be written for Linux and the price would need to come down but it is an interesting option. I had no idea that it was that cheap already.
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0273840
Note, that this is not a random sample of high school students, but an after school club for students interested in technology and engineering. Nevertheless, they were impressive.
I learned a lot.
Most had already used Linux at some point.
Two had given talks on using Scratch.
I was pleased to see girls well represented in the group.
The first thing they wanted to do with it was customize. One of them was a Gimp user and wanted to download Gimp. SLAX is not as easy to install things with.
Evaluation of the Teaching Matters One Laptop Per Child (XO) Pilot at Kappa I V-
Some interesting notes as that might be relevent to a USB based implementation.
The pilot was done in a 6th grade at a Middle school. I would have guesed that the students at that age might have rebelled against some of the toy-like feel of the XO but infact a number of them appreciated that it was made for kids.
I think its wonderful and appropriate that Clayton Christensen uses Linux as an example of modularity in software.
However, as someone who is currently coming up to speed with Linux and all the various distributions the quote from Page 123 of "Disrupting Class" confused me.
"Linux ia modular system composed of "kernels" that fit together in well-defined ways. This makes it smple for applicatin developers to design and build their own customized operating system"
More then one kernel working together?? That didn't sound right to me. Its not. Here is the Wikipedia explaination.
Walter and Wanda Bender, Amy Bisiewicz and myself visited the computer lab at the Shaw School in Boston to gather more information on how we could provide the Sugar educational platform to students there.
Our testing focused on figuring out what it will take to make Sugar run on the existing Compaq Pentium 4 "EVO" desktops with 256M of DRAM. Several different distributions were tested and "Puppy Linux" a tiny version of linux had by far the best performance. Ubuntu and Fedoa would not completely boot.
Walter's notes are here: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Supported_systems#LiveCD
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