Sugar Labs

business

License: GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3)

Web Page: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2014

Mailing List: sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org

Sugar Labs is a 100% volunteer-driven project, a member project of the nonprofit Software Freedom Conservancy. Sugar Labs coordinates volunteers—international community of teachers, software developers, artists and writers, parents and children—who are passionate about providing educational opportunities to children through the Sugar Learning Platform. Globally, there are teachers that discuss how they use Sugar in their classrooms; students who blog about their Sugar learning experiences; and everyone, not just software engineers, contribute to the code base. (Children as young as 10-years old have written Sugar activities and we regularly receive patches from 14-year-olds.) At Sugar Labs, we promote investing locally in learning that works for every child. While there are many great ICT-oriented learning projects, what distinguishes Sugar is its platform features. Like a sponge, Sugar pulls in projects such as Gcompris, Etoys, Scratch, and Open Office for Children, as well as hundreds of learning activities specifically written for Sugar, making those great tools available to more children. But the Sugar platform further enhances the learning experience through its mechanisms of collaboration and reflection. With Sugar, the computer represents more than an opportunity for interaction with isolated applications; it is the manifestation of a change in the culture of learning. 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. The Sugar software is a learning platform designed for children, originally designed for the XO laptop of the OLPC project, but completely independent of OLPC since Q1 2008. Sugar installs on most GNU/Linux distros, hence it can run on most netbooks and PCs and on virtual machines in Windows and iOS. Sugar is used by more than three-million students in Peru, Uruguay, Rwanda, Nepal, the United States, and more than 40 other countries. Sugar is Free Software (GPL3) and is available in more than 25 languages. (We have projects in more than 150 languages and full support in many indigenous languages, such as Quechua and Aymara in Peru. Sugar Labs provides i18n support for many of our upstream projects, including Abiword and Etoys.)

Projects

• Activity Unit/UI Tests SugarLabs has many activities that come pre-installed in the bundle and presently there are no test suites for the activities. This project will help in writing the test suites for the respective activities. The test suite will be written for those activities which come in the fructose installation. As a part of the project, the testing guide for the sugarLabs activities will also be updated.
• Bulletin Board The project Bulletin Board is all about learning by promoting interaction among users in a fun manner replacing the traditional forum discussions . A shared, persistent "clipboard" : This provides a space for sharing in each activity where users can provide supporting material for the underlying activity. A chat channel : Bulletin Board will provide a spatially contextual chatting interface comprising of chat bubbles thoughout the screen promoting interaction among users.
• Cordova Container for Sugar This project is aimed at building a new platform on cordova for sugar.It shall help us to build activities for mobile using html,js and css and the interaction with the device's native api can be provided by invoking the javascript libraries. These libraries would provide device specific native backing code.The developers can build more interactive activities for kids which will surely be a great learning experience for them.
• Enhancements to the Music Keyboard activity I'll be working to improve the music keyboard activity. Making it more user friendly, adding ability to record notes and play them back and allowing a user to record his/her compositions and export it to a audio file.
• Hack a Stuffed Animal I would like to work on the project "Hack a Stuffed Animal" this Summer. I have previous experience with programming with Scratch, building robots, usability design testing, and I find this project immensely interesting. I really like the idea of taking a child's stuffed animal and turning it into an input device that the child could use to learn new technology. I really like how it's focus is on children who are challenged with non-verbal skills, such as children with Autism.
• Port to Python 3 This Project aims to port sugar to python 3 , write a robust test suite and write a porting guide for sugar activities.
• Social Help for Sugar A social discussion platform for sugar and related components that can be accessed from within sugar. The user is launched into a discussion topic based on the context of the launch.
• Sugar Listens - Speech Recognition within the Sugar Learning Platform Sugar Listens seeks to provide an easy-to-use speech recognition API to educational content developers, within the Sugar Learning Platform. This will allow developers to integrate speech-enabled interfaces to their Sugar Activities, letting users interact with Sugar through voice commands. This goal will be achieved by exposing the open-source speech recognition engine Pocketsphinx as a D-Bus service.
• Turtle Art 3D - a 3D extension for Turtle Blocks Sugar is lacking any 3D programming environments. This project would be to develop such an environment. There is a rich program in 3D Logo developed by Horacio Reggini. The specific project would be to write an extension to Turtle Blocks to encompass Reggini's ideas.