GSoC/GCI Archive
GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2013

Sugar Labs

Web Page: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2013

Mailing List: mailto:iaep@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 12-years old have written Sugar activities and we regularly receive patches from 15-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

  • Implement help mechanism for activities using Mallard Implement a Help mechanism for Sugar Activities that can be viewed from the activity itself. This will be implemented using Mallard.
  • Open Video Chat Cross Platform Port Port the Open Video Chat software to multiple platforms, including support for development environment hardware. This would allow developers, teachers, and others who do not have an XO or sugar development environment to communicate with sugar users over a video chat service.
  • Project Sharing WebSite for SugarLabs Goal of this project is to implement a Project Sharing site to foster collaboration and sharing of Open source projects over the internet.The website upon the completion would also provide REST-API’s , so that the services of the website could be utilised by the Sugar Activities to share the project on the site and it will also provide the third party developers to integrate the services in their own apps.
  • Social Sugar Social Sugar project involves development of GUI components that can help bring user's social interactions on external platforms into Sugar. A perfect target can be the Group-View that shows user's friends and their shared activities, but it could also show social information about these friends.
  • Sugar Framework for wrting HTML5 activities The objective of my project is to develop a JavaScript framework which allows developers to write sugar activities in HTML5/JavaScript.
  • Translation Server The aim of this project is to establish a server program and client API that can be used in activities to introduce a way to reliably access quality machine translations of arbitrary strings. As a proof of concept, a simple translation activity will be created for Sugar using this API.
  • Turtle Blocks Python export Turtle Blocks teaches children an important skill in today's world: programming. Its block-based graphical interface makes abstract concepts like loops easy to understand and fun to play with. But it does not yet support the next step in learning: writing code in a 'real' programming language. My project fills this gap by automatically converting block programs to Python code. It enables the children to transfer their knowledge to a text-based language and to focus on acquiring the new syntax.