Sugar (software)

About

Sugar is an operating system which reinvents the use of computers for education in our society. Collaboration, reflection and discovery are incorporated straightforwardly into the user interface. Sugar encourages “studio thinking” and “reflective practice”. Through Sugar’s clarity of environment, young learners and educators have the choice to utilize PCs in all alone terms. Students can reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content into intense learning exercises. Sugar’s concentration on sharing, criticism, and investigation is grounded in the culture of free software.

Information is about nouns; learning is about verbs. The Sugar interface is the first serious endeavor to make a desktop environment that is based on both cognitive and social constructivism which is designed for children. Sugar is based on three basic principles:

1. Everybody is an instructor and a learner;

2. Humans by nature are social beings and;

3. Expressive by nature. These are the pillars of a user experience for learning.

Sugar also considers two more truisms:

1. One learns through doing. If you want to learn more and more, then for that You have to do more and more.

2. Love is far more significant than duty-you want people to participate in things that are authentic to them, things that they love.

The Sugar platform is characterized by three qualities: -

1. The presence of other individuals is always present in the Sugar interface; collaboration is a first-order experience: instructors and learners interact with each other, bolster each other, critique each other and share their thoughts with each other;

2. Sugar Maintains a “Journal” for each user so that his/her task is reflected on it;

3. Through its excellent design, Sugar is discoverable: it can suit a wide assortment of learners with various levels of aptitude. It is easy to approach and yet it doesn’t put an upper bound on personal expression; one can peel away layers and go deeper and deeper with no restrictions.

Design principles

Sugar has the objective of being suitable for even inexperienced users, but provides more advanced facilities for the more experienced. The project's stated goal is to "avoid bloated interfaces", and "limit the controls to those immediately relevant to the task at hand.". Applications run full screen, double-clicking is not used, and menus show icons.

Sugar is written in Python, an interpreted language, and can be modified by users with programming experience. Desktop environments used by many operating systems are written in compiled languages such as C.

Software components

Applications developed by Sugar are very pragmatic which offers number of opportunity to avail which enhances the skills and make them dexterous in their field.Sugar Activities include Turle Blocks 3D, Ruler, Recall and many more.

Hundreds of learning activities for Sugar can be downloaded from the Sugar Activity Library. Additional activities are available from third parties, such as the Project Ceibal portal in Uruguay.

History

In May 2006 Sugar's developers described it as primarily a "tool for expression," and plans were in place to include multimedia and social networking features.

Since May 2008 Sugar has been developed under the umbrella of Sugar Labs, a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Some contributors are employed by One Laptop per Child and other related organizations, others are volunteers, in many cases associated with the free software community. Contributors to the original Sugar platform included Marco Pesenti Gritti, Walter Bender, Christopher Blizzard, Eben Eliason, Simon Schampijer, Christian Schmidt, Lisa Strausfeld, Takaaki Okada, Tomeu Vizoso, and Dan Williams.

Cross-platform

By early 2007 Sugar could be installed, with some difficulty, on several Linux distributions, and in virtual machines on other operating systems. By mid-2008 Sugar was available on the Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora distributions of Linux; e.g., as of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), Sugar could be installed from the official Ubuntu universe repositories. By mid-2009 Sugar was also available on openSUSE and other Linux distributions. Sugar 0.82.1 was included in the OLPC system software release 8.2.0 for XO-1 laptops. Sugar 0.86 was released on September 30, 2009. Sugar 0.88 was released on March 31, 2010. Sugar 0.90.0 was released in October, 2010. There were three releases in 2011 and one in June 2012, which included support for the ARM architecture on the XO 1.75. Builds for OLPC XO laptops and the release schedule are available at OS releases. Sugar has unofficially been ported to run on Android, Firefox OS and iOS using HTML5 and JavaScript under the project name "Sugarizer"; with additional clients written for Web browsers supporting HTML5.

Sugar on a Stick

The Sugar learning platform for Linux is available as a USB-bootable Linux distribution ("Sugar on a Stick") and as software components forming an installable additional desktop environment for most Linux distributions. It can be installed using the Fedora Live USB Creator, and can be installed onto a computer hard disk using the liveinst command from a Sugar Terminal or console.

On June 23, 2009, Sugar Labs announced the availability for download of Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry, which can run from a bootable 1GB USB flash drive. On July 23, 2009, Recycle USB.com went live with a program to reflash used USB keys with the Sugar software and donate them to schools. On December 8, 2009, Sugar Labs announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry, which incorporates Sugar Release 0.86 and Fedora 11. Sugar Labs announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick v3 Mirabelle, which incorporates Sugar Release 0.88 and Fedora 13. Since Mirabelle, Sugar on a Stick has been a regular, semi-annual, Fedora Spin (official special-purpose version of Fedora); the a Spin using Fedora v22 was released on 26 May 2015.

XO-1 Usage

The OLPC XO-1 has a 1 GB NAND flash drive and 256 MB of memory. Because the flash-based hard drive is small, swap can only be added by using an SD card or a network block device.

If too many activities are loaded at the same time there may be performance problems due to low memory or processor load.

XO releases

For viewing XO releases, please click here.

Strawberry

The Sugar on a Stick Strawberry release is based on Fedora 11 with the latest updates as of June 22, 2009. It features a Sugar learning environment, namely version 0.84, including 40 Activities to enrich the learning experience. Hundreds of Activities are available for download from the Sugar activity library. This release includes Fedora updates, Sugar features like View Source and file transfer, supplementary sample content, which is available in the Journal, and usability improvements.

Blueberry

Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry was released on 8 December 2009. It is based on F12 version of the Fedora operating system. It contains a number of features that improve the overall user and learning experience. Here is an overview of the most notable ones:

1. In high demand was a software to install Sugar to a hard disk. Hence Sugar teamed up the zyx-liveinstaller developer in order to provide:
2. Seamless installation of personalized environment into your computer’s hard disk;
3. It saves changes made to Sugar;
4. It does not require boot again and again.

1. It includes updates to the standard collection of Activities for children and many new ones. An example is TamTam activity suite, which takes the user on a journey through Sound and Music.

Mirabelle

Mirabelle was the 3rd release of the Sugar on a Stick project. It was released on 25 May 2010.

1. Support for 3G connections
2. Increased accessibility
3. Better integration with activity portal

Mango Lassi

Mango Lassi was the 4th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 2 November 2010. It uses Sugar version 0.90.

Coconut

It is the 5th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 9 October 2011. It uses a Sugar version 0.92.

Pineapple

It is the 6th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 8 November 2011. It uses a Sugar version 0.94.1.

Quadong

It is the 7th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 29 May 2012. It uses a Sugar version 0.96.1.

ʻŌhelo ʻai

It is the 8th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 15 January 2013. It uses a sugar version 0.98.2.

Avocado

It is the 9th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 2 July 2013. It uses a Sugar version 0.98.8.

10

It is the 10th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 17 December 2013. It uses a Sugar version 0.100.0.

Now Sugar has stopped giving official names to SoaS releases, however it continues to create new versions for each Fedora release. Sugar has released its latest versions for the latest Fedora’s:

Sugarizer

Sugarizer is a way to use Sugar on any device using web technologies (HTML5/JavaScript). Sugarizer is not a port of Sugar. It is based on Sugar web library, which resembles the Sugar User Interface using HTML5 and CSS3 and reproduces Sugar views. Sugarizer reimplements features of Sugar Core (datastore and journal) in JavaScript and integrates a bunch of activities written for Sugar in Sugar Web. So basically, Sugarizer is "just" a launcher of Sugar Web activities. A Sugarizer server component allows collaboration and presence.

Sugarizer could run any Sugar activities written in HTML5/JavaScript and include a bunch of Sugar activities written initially in Python and ported in HTML5/JavaScript (Physics, Paint, ...).

Sugarizer has a lots of features. Some of them include:

Visit Sugarizer from here.