Sugar Vision

Sugar Vision talk at FUDCON11 by Walter Bender, transcribed by Mel Chua. Edits/corrections welcomed, all mistakes are Mel's fault.

walter: I gave this talk in 1984. will be small and informal. I want to talk about Sugar and Sugar Labs - not going to be talking alot about technology, since people have been getting that more about the management It's about learning. It's about making a change in the way that basic learning happens. This was the original mission statement for OLPC as well. This is 1983 in senegal (slide) - this is one of the first 1-to-1 computing things Papert was working with a school in Senegal. (slide shows picture of Papert, a child, and a computer) the ideas behind Sugar has to be taken back to the work of Seymour from back then. (Mel: These notes, again, are paraphrased.) We had an educational technology called the "mimeograph machine" back then. When we first started OLPC, there was an educational software company nearby and they made a software to help teachers make worksheets, because teachers are too busy to do that. So this is 2008 (next slide: children with XOs in Thailand) - children with XOs. The difference between this picture an the other people is that i'ts laptops and the nice thing about laptops it that they are portable. s/people/picture In this case, it's rural children documenting the forest in their community. Marvin (Minsky) who is one of my favorite people at MIT, has made some statements about learning (slide: "The playfulness of childhood is the most demanding teacher we have. Never again in those children’s lives will anything drive them to work so hard. --Minsky") Henry Jenkins used to study fans - like fans pushing air around. One of his observations is that $word-I-missed are different from the rest of us - standard deviations from the norm. $word-I-missed == explorers, perhaps? When Jenkins described this I got really wary, because my kids at the time were little, 6-7 ish and they were doing all the same things that Henry's crazy fan people were. (Mel: the word was either explorers or experimenters - formal scientists, I think) But the mass production model of school doesn't encourage that. That kind of thinking. And my response to Bryan's comments about why this is difficult is - right, except what we want to do is make this opportunity happen whenever it can. And then - science is important. Critical thinking is important. much of what we're asking is asking people to be critical thinkers.  So the other thing is - I used to ask audiences "what are the great learning moments in your life?" rarely was it lectures. I mean, this is not a great learning moment in your life right now. Simon: It's a mixture - you can get new inspiration by listening to someone, and then go and do stuff with it. Bryan: A lot of learning is hearing other people talk about stuff. Walter: Some of it is lost in the hysteria about constructionism - you can't realistically expect that each one of us is going to invent so part of the idea is you want to balance discovery and exploration with expression. Bryan: for instance, addition is a habit - you don't actually critically think, now, oh, 3+5 is... now I have to think about it - it's a mechanism you have developed in your brain. Ben: Multiplication algorithms that little kids learn now were super sophisticated several hundred years ago - advanced math research. Walter: The language we give kids around that knowledge is important. We don't tell them about linearity, or the stuff that makes math interesting... we don't give them that vocabulary and grammar today. I have to put in a special penguin (next slide) because I think free software is fundamental. Bryan: One big point is that software is never done. Michael:  (Mel: Bryan was talking about how software - esp. open source software - can always be picked up and improved, made better.) Someone I don't know yet: You set up this environment where you're intended to fail as part of the learning experience. Walter: Abundance is very important. It's about sharing, but it's also about critique. The discussion about rpms vs xos - eventually the best idea will come to the top. Bryan: The prevailing educational culture is that Someone says "This is what you should learn." Ben: Guido van Rossum, Python's creator, criticized the OLPC project as "the 21st century equivalent of handing out Bibles in Latin America." If you hand out systems that are locked and closed and preconfigured, then you're imposing your view on things. But if we give them an open, empowering system,that's different. (Mel: I disagree with Ben, but that's for later.) Walter: Another place where we fall short is - look at the difference between a pdf and a wiki. One makes it easier to write margin notes and share things with other people. I don't think we have the right affordances yet in Sugar to do this kind of thing. Taglines of sugar: 1. Learning is not a service. Learning is a verb, information is a noun. 2. You learn by doing. 3. Love is a better master than duty. Laptops can help deliver information on whatever you are interested in. About sugar - here's the home view (slide: screenshot of interface)   |tanya|: note how many people are typing on their laptops, see how bernie and simon are whispering to each other - there are a lot of backchannel conversations going on. |tanya|: (we just may not be able to see them all) Walter: One of the principles we have is simplicity. One way of thinking about is that the world is complicated, so let's use simple tools to help us get at that complexity. We don't want a simple world, but we want simple tools to get started. Walter: (or rather, shows a screenshot of it) Literally, 2 year olds can walk up to it and start using it with no instruction. I have seen it many times. So some kids will grow beyond that, and they'll go to tamtam jam, and tamtam jam has multiple voices - you can sync your drums with other laptops... ...and then there's tamtam edit, which lets you start laying down tracks... (the first screenshot was tamtam mini) ...and then tamtam synthlab - where you can make your own instruments. (Mel: Walter is using TamTam as an example of progressive - but still simple - tools for dealing with the complex world, in this case sound/music.)  Walter: There's a lot of programming environments - like pippy. TurtleArt is intro logo. I'm the maintainer of this package now. Ben:   |tanya|: Also, it's interesting to see how fast the discussion in the room can turn towards hacking and program design. ;) Walter: One feature I added recently is an export function that turns your project into standard logo, berkeley logo. But anyway, this is an introduction, it's meant to make you interested. More neat ideas: turtleart with sensors. Now we can interact with the physical world. Another thing - we want kids to reflect in their work. The journal just captures things We've been talking about the concept of putting a portfolio in. I made a powerpoint-like thing out of turtleart. s/demo/talk about screenshot The point is that kids can make presentations, but also that they can see that this is just another program that they can build stuff with. I want to talk about collaboration.   It's rare that students have open internet access in a classroom, so it's hard for them to collaborate this way - but here, they can collaborate locally without that priv. The Journal - it's this place that stores everything you do.  I think by default that launching Activities - should be most recent instance of that Activity in the Journal... anyway. One thing about Sugar is that it works. Marco (lead Sugar developer): Are you sure?  (Mel: That data - are we sure it's Sugar that accounts for that increase (and not the passage of time, or... anything else?) Greg: It would be great to hear what actual users say - drill down from the bar graph. Michael:  Walter: We don't necessarily have that information access. I know there's some very detailed studies we just don't have access to. Bryan: We're used to schools with nice parents and decent teachers - you won't see big leaps there. (if Sugar is adopted.) Walter: Grades aren't necessarily correlated with future performance. Bernie: I can believe that kids that spend a lot of time hacking on a laptop might get worse grades in school. Of course, if you engage in creative learning, you don't have the time to memorize this stuff in school. Tony: There are many ways to learn things. Memorizing is just one of them. I bet you can find kids you can rattle you off baseball stats, because they're interested in them. For example - we learned to touchtype as kids in school in a really boring class. But now we have kids that want to go on chat, so they're going to learn touchtyping because they want it! Bernie: Sometimes you memorize because you have to, sometimes because you want to. Walter:   It will make a difference, because one of the big barriers is that sometimes you can't do 1-to-1 laptops, and sometimes admins don't want school computers to be touched.  Michael: Back to Walter! Walter: I'm done. I can give the demo if people want. (Of TurtleArt.) 
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