Sugar on a Stick

Summary
Sugar on a Stick is a Sugar environment that you can carry in your pocket.

Previous releases

 * [ Fedora 13]

Owner(s)

 * Name: Sebastian Dziallas
 * Name: Peter Robinson

This spin is a joint project of Fedora Mini and Fedora OLPC.

Detailed Description
See the spin description.

Benefit to Fedora
Sugar on a Stick, as a solution itself, will give Fedora a stronger standing. Through using the Sugar on a Stick name, a recognized and acclaimed brand, Fedora will significantly benefit from having Sugar on a Stick as an official spin. As outlined in the Sugar 0.90 feature description, this spin will allow us to capture the interest in developing for OLPC and Sugar Labs on the Fedora platform.

Kickstart File

 * http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=spin-kickstarts.git;a=blob_plain;f=fedora-livecd-soas.ks;hb=F-16

ISO Name / FS Label

 * sugar-on-a-stick-{%soas-version}-%{arch}

For Fedora 14, SoaS is at version 4.

Dependencies

 * None currently

Scope / Testing
This is being covered on the Sugar 0.90 feature page.

Spins Page
See http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas for the current version.

Slogan
Discover. Reflect. Share. Learn.

Spin description
Sugar on a Stick is a Fedora-based operating system featuring the award-winning Sugar Learning Environment and designed to fit on a USB thumbdrive ("stick"). Originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child Project and designed specifically as a 1-to-1 computing environment for K-8 students to collaborate with others in exploring the world around them, Sugar is used every day by over half a million students in classrooms throughout the world. It is now deployable for the cost of a stick rather than a laptop; students can take their Sugar on a Stick thumbdrive to any machine - at school, at home, at a library or community center - and boot their customized computing environment without touching the host machine's hard disk at all.

The Sugar Learning Environment gives students access to a thriving community-created ecosystem of software Activities designed to achieve specific pedagogical goals. Activities range from physics simulators and interactive speech synthesis for beginning readers to tools for remixing open content into customized digital libraries for your local classroom. Sugar automatically saves your progress to a personal "Journal" on your stick, so teachers and parents can easily pull up "all collaborative web browsing sessions done in the past week" or "papers written with Daniel and Sarah in the last 24 hours" with a simple query rather than memorizing complex file/folder structures. The source code for each Activity is available right from the application itself with the "View Source" feature, meaning that students can see exactly how their favorite applications work - and perhaps how to make them even better. And an international community of learners, teachers, deployers, and developers is always there to help classrooms turn their feedback and ideas for improvement into reality.

Join us in enabling children to reclaim computers for themselves - we need contributors of all ages, backgrounds, and types to help us bring open source personal computing to classrooms as a tool for enabling exploration. Learn More. >

Screenshot

 * http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Soas-1.png

About tab
Information is about nouns. Learning is about verbs. The Sugar user interface differs from traditional user interfaces in that it is based on both cognitive and social constructivism. A video tour of the Sugar Learning Platform is available here: LINK

The third Sugar on a Stick release, "Mirabelle," is a slim, stable version of the Sugar Learning Platform featuring a few classroom-tested Activities and designed for remixability and customization by adventurous students, families, and small classroom deployments who want to try something different and help shape the future of personalized learning for children around the world.

Two principles define the Sugar learning platform:


 * We learn through doing, so if we want more learning, we want more doing.
 * Love is a better master than duty — you want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. Internal motivation almost always trumps external motivations.

Three experiences characterize the design of Sugar:


 * Discovering: Sugar can accommodate a wide variety of users, 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 personal expression. One can peel away layers and go deeper and deeper, with no restrictions.
 * Reflecting: Sugar uses a "Journal" to record each learner's activity. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress.
 * Sharing: The Sugar interface always shows the presence of other learners. Collaboration is a first-order experience. Students and teachers dialog with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas.

Three principles define the Sugar Labs community:


 * everyone is a teacher and a learner;
 * humans by their nature are social beings;
 * humans by their nature are expressive.

If these ideas excite you, we invite you to join us. No prior experience with computers or educational technology is required - in fact, we actively encourage a diversity of backgrounds, ages, and perspectives since our ultimate goal is to make the Sugar experience deployable by classroom teachers and supportable by older students and the local community. Try Sugar on a Stick today and learn more about how you can join our community of contributors; we need packagers, testers, developers, curriculum designers, local deployers, and more.

Download tab

 * liveusb-creator instructions go here
 * http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/
 * figure out links: we need hardcoded links to iso files (we want isos not torrents). use alt.fp.o/alt/olpc/0.88-1/soas-3-mirabelle.iso - confirm with mmcgrath
 * link to creation kit (bump & build and release)

Support tab
While we hope that Sugar on a Stick works flawlessly for you, if you do run into any problems, there are several forums for seeking help. The first place to go with a question is our community bug-tracking portal. There you will find answers to frequently asked questions, too. We also have a help page, mailing lists, this wiki, and an IRC channel: irc.freenode.net #sugar (See help using IRC).

see: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Sugar_on_a_Stick/Getting_Involved

Custom branding

 * To be worked out with Fedora and Sugar Labs design teams.

Comments and Discussion

 * See Talk:Sugar_on_a_Stick