[HN Gopher] Sugar: An activity-focused, open-source software lea...
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Sugar: An activity-focused, open-source software learning platform
for children
Author : bane
Score : 152 points
Date : 2024-03-06 03:09 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sugarlabs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sugarlabs.org)
| StimDeck wrote:
| Neat, the gears were pretty entertaining, but whose kids will sit
| and use this?
|
| I think it's incredible that people are volunteering their time
| to create open source learning software.
|
| I hope it's extensible enough to incorporate paid content. IMHO
| anything less can compete for attention in today's attention
| economy.
| pooper wrote:
| > I hope it's extensible enough to incorporate paid content.
| IMHO anything less can compete for attention in today's
| attention economy.
|
| I don't want any paid content in my learning experience. We
| should encourage free as in beer and free as in freedom
| learning materials.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| As a former child who had his mind blown by the utter magic
| that my parents' Windows 3.11 and then Windows 95 machines
| had, no: I want real software I can play and learn the ins-
| and-outs with. I want games that are made with care for the
| children who play them (Oregon Trail, Math Blasters,
| JumpStart series, etc.)
|
| Whether it's paid or libre is irrelevant, kids literally
| don't care about Adult(tm) concepts like that.
| LawrenceKerr wrote:
| Ideally these things should be subsidized or at least run on
| generous donations, yes. But quality matters most to me. I'd
| happily pay for educational software that is proven to be
| better (more engaging, more fun, better learning outcomes)
| than free & open-source alternatives.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah not mine.
|
| The screenshot for "This is one of the many fun activities" is
| a black and white blocky maze!
|
| I'm sure they mean well, but whoever made this doesn't have
| children.
| wojciii wrote:
| I tried to use this some time ago with my kids but they
| didn't find it interesting enough.
|
| I noticed that all the open source learning apps that I could
| find were kind of amateurish and buggy.
|
| I would pay good money for a tablet filled with software for
| kids that would teach the basics and be interesting at the
| same time.
|
| I found some games where I was able to remove adds (one time
| payment) and an app used for learning reading/writing.
| alias_neo wrote:
| I'm at the stage where I'm trying to get my kids into tech
| based "building", I'm a software engineer so want to start
| teaching them to write code asap, but don't want to start
| their computer journey there.
|
| I had a click through of this out of interest; by the time
| I'd picked a colour for my avatar (awful gaudy colour
| combinations), read the half-dozen tutorial tool-tips just to
| get the the main ring, I was already bored stiff, as an adult
| with an almost limitless concentration span.
|
| I hate to say it, but I can't imagine my children wanting to
| use this as it's presented, at any age.
| senectus1 wrote:
| this look suspiciously like the onelaptop for all stuff. remember
| those "wind up" laptops that they wanted to crowdsource for
| places that dont have electricity or internet.
| jayunit wrote:
| Looks like! https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar
| rrix2 wrote:
| I've got two OLPC XO and one of the mainboards, they're such
| neat little machines. Never got one of the crank chargers
| though.
| Dwedit wrote:
| It's exactly that. It's the software that was developed for the
| XO laptop.
| dosman33 wrote:
| IMHO, it was the correct pivot for them - from hardware to the
| OS.
|
| I remember the OLPC hardware was harshly criticized by
| industry, and even the audacity of the project was widely
| attacked. I considered it proof they were just ahead of the
| market here and industry realized it was behind the 8-ball.
| Meanwhile OLPC spawned a new form factor, netbooks and tablets
| did not exist until the OLPC project was first proposed in
| 2005. Netbooks wouldn't materialize until 2007, and the ipad
| launched in 2010. Once industry caught up though it was hard to
| compete against that, and at the end of the day OLPC was about
| the mission, not the hardware - but you can't have the mission
| without the hardware. So pivoting to Sugar was a smart move to
| achieve the mission once industry caught up.
|
| You can certainly make other arguments against some of the
| ideas of the project and what it was trying to achieve though.
| It definitely is a Western idea being applied to problems other
| civilizations may not have an interest in contending with.
| Water and food security, let alone electricity and
| communication infrastructure, are still real problems in the
| areas OLPC was targeted at.
| Lazonedo wrote:
| > Meanwhile OLPC spawned a new form factor, netbooks and
| tablets did not exist until the OLPC project was first
| proposed in 2005.
|
| What? they've existed for aeons, they were just not practical
| enough in UI to be a success in the market.
|
| https://youtu.be/IK2bAAAdBxs?t=59
|
| Netbook format computer (thicker than what came after the
| OLPC, obviously, but still well within the range of tiny
| machines in terms of keyboard/screen size) that converts into
| a tablet PC in /1993/.
|
| https://youtu.be/ArjRjU9SSr4?t=189
|
| The UMPC, tablet PCs from the Windows XP era.
|
| https://youtu.be/E1r2e8ub02o?t=245
|
| Sony's Vaio tablet PC with a slider style keyboard.
|
| https://youtu.be/DORREhWt9x0?t=725 Sony PCG-U101, a cross in
| size between the netbooks and palmtop style PCs.
|
| The fact of the matter, the iPad is still the only device in
| this kind of form factor that has enjoyed long term success
| and it is entirely due to the UI being such a good fit for
| the device. Netbooks entirely disappeared from the market
| because using linux or windows with that kind of tiny screen
| is absolutely unpleasant and the tiny keyboards make typing
| painful. The smaller chromebooks in the market tend to be 12
| inches, which is far more manageable than the horrible 9
| inches of the average netbook. Chromebooks aren't the
| successor to this device type, this device type disappeared
| from the market never to be seen again.
|
| Pleasant to use was not the OLPC strong point either.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Developed as part of the One Laptop Per Child.
|
| Uses python, so the desktop is interpreted & open for
| modification (not compiled).
|
| Sugar was so incredibly far ahead of the curve. Figma &
| multiplayer computing? Sugar was doing this in ~2007. Local-first
| software, where a class-room without internet connectivity could
| share a canvas & collaborate together:
| https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/collaborating.html
|
| The underpinnings were amazing. They used DBus for a lot of the
| activities to expose themselves programatically. To make things
| multiplayer, they used link-local XMPP to connect various DBus
| instances together. It was a brilliantly direct & straightforward
| & not-absurd way to take the FreeDesktop ideas & turn them into
| something connected & cross-system, without having to build a
| whole new stack.
| https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/book/sect.tubes.dbus.h...
|
| It's really easy to see all the ways Sugar and OLPC didn't
| accomplish their mission & to see how it didn't work. But people
| just pass over all the incredible competently resourceful tech
| choices that were made here. And seemingly no one has had the
| ambition to unleash FreeDesktop technologies again (also RIP
| Maemo). Heck, no one's made a local-first laptop ever again!
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Sugar, and more generally the idea of using 2006-era Python to
| write an entire userland on a device with a pokey CPU and
| limited RAM, was a huge part of why OLPCs were _unbearably_
| slow to use. For all the hypothetical benefits it was a
| catastrophically poor decision that seriously undermined
| everything great about the hardware design of the XO-1.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Worth being clear, this doesn't detract from it now, where it
| is plenty fast on far cheaper hardware than the XO-1.
| oven9342 wrote:
| so since 2007 and 2023, we must have scientific assessment on
| the benefits of using computers instead of books?
| Shorel wrote:
| It seems like a great product, with a terrible name.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Out if curiosity, what's your take on the name?
|
| I'm okay with it, despite preferring names that help frame the
| product's purpose in my mind, but I can see the kid appeal in a
| name like Sugar Lab. Maybe I am missing some negative
| association, though.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Sugar Daddy?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Sugar just conjures up all sorts of negative connotations
| these days, especially if you are a parent. Like, as a
| parent, I see one of my major tasks in life as preparing my
| kid to enter a world where sugar (and lots of other forms of
| unhealthy but pleasurable things) are much more ubiquitous
| than the environment in which their basic intuitions about
| behavior evolved. One other area beyond literal physical
| sugar where this is true is technology, where a huge part of
| the ecosystem is actively predatory on children's time and
| attention. So the combination of "Sugar" as a name and
| something vaguely related to tech just gives bad vibes all
| around.
|
| I've tried Sugar out and I frankly find it somewhat
| condescending to children. Kid's don't need to be manipulated
| into using computers. They like them already and can readily
| appreciate that they are both fun and powerful. Rather than
| present to them a dumbed down interface we should be
| empowering them to use computers as they are, and
| conditioning them to expect that the computer itself be
| accessible to them, not hidden behind a fancy UI. When my kid
| was barely able to read I was showing him how to edit code
| and observe how it changes the behavior of characters in a
| game. He got it. We don't need goofy simplified user
| interfaces.
| dustfinger wrote:
| > Kid's don't need to be manipulated into using computers.
| They like them already and can readily appreciate that they
| are both fun and powerful. Rather than present to them a
| dumbed down interface we should be empowering them to use
| computers as they are, and conditioning them to expect that
| the computer itself be accessible to them, not hidden
| behind a fancy UI.
|
| I could not agree with this statement more. I started
| teaching my daughter Python and bash when she was 8. I am
| currently teaching my son (11) C++ and bash and he does all
| of his coding in emacs. They both use exwm and are eager to
| continue learning.
|
| Having said that, I can see a huge challenge for non-
| technical parents. If those families would like to teach
| their children about computers, operating systems, the
| internet, web browsers and possibly programming, they need
| help from somewhere. I don't think my kids would have stuck
| with it if I had just handed them a link to the RFC
| standards [1] or the c++ getting started resources [2]. I
| really can't say how I would have approached ensuring my
| kids had a head start with technical computer knowledge had
| I not the knowledge myself. It is a predatory world out
| there, and access to your child's attention is valuable
| since they are the future. It must be difficult for parents
| who are conscious of this to find quality technical
| learning resources for their kids.
|
| [1] https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/
|
| [2] https://isocpp.org/get-started
| oven9342 wrote:
| >I really can't say how I would have approached ensuring
| my kids had a head start with technical computer
| knowledge had I not the knowledge myself.
|
| Yeah, I was wondering how to teach my kid some computer
| languages I never quite got the hang of
| xrd wrote:
| I would really, really like to read more about the
| approaches you are taking to teaching your kids to code.
| My kids are all on Linux computers and I'm trying to wean
| them off iPads and consumption devices. But it feels like
| addictive apps can draw them back very quickly (looking
| at you, YouTube).
| dustfinger wrote:
| > My kids are all on Linux computers
|
| That is great to hear. My kids are both on pi 4s, but we
| customized the Debian distribution quite a bit to
| optimize its hardware acceleration capabilities and to
| overclock the hardware as much as possible. The pi boots
| from a fast nvme usb drive and i/o peripherals are
| connected via a fast usb hub. They are cooled by the ice
| tower [1]. They are both using exwm [2] and do not
| require a mouse. They both type on plank mechanical
| keyboards from olkb. All of this customization they found
| quite exciting. Especially being able to mess with their
| own keyboards.
|
| > I'm trying to wean them off iPads and consumption
| devices. But it feels like addictive apps can draw them
| back very quickly (looking at you, YouTube).
|
| We do not own any ipads. Only desktop computers, and I
| own a couple of laptops, such as the librem 14 and the
| mnt-reform. Youtube is a bit of a problem, I agree. They
| need access to it for their schooling at the moment, but
| the use of it does need to be limited, and the content
| limited as well, or they will just start watching brain
| numbing junk. I have decided not to block anything on our
| network with the goal of establishing a sense of trust,
| but I also don't allow them to have free rein. It is an
| endless exercise in finding the right balance :-). To be
| honest, it is much more of a problem with my son, then it
| is with my daughter, who spends a lot of her free time
| drawing and writing and isn't as entertained by youtube
| videos.
|
| As for teaching them to code, I have been giving them
| series of exercises and challenges that build up their
| skill with a few goals:
|
| 1. to build their own online mud (multi user dungeon)
|
| 2. to write their own compiler
|
| 3. to write their own operating system
|
| 4. to make their own computer
|
| 5. They each have come up with their own personal
| projects, so I tailor exercises to help them with
| problems that they need to solve
|
| For our development environment, we use emacs + eglot
| [3], which is not surprising since the windows manager is
| exwm. I make them compile and debug from the command-
| line, because I want them to be competent with standard
| command-line tools. Fancy GUI-centric IDEs are
| distracting because all of the options are visible to
| them even though they lack the skill or need for such
| features.
|
| I wanted this to be a happy experience, so I have never
| pushed them, but always challenge them to push
| themselves. I spend a few hours with them every weekend,
| then a couple of hours with them mid week to help them
| with challenges. But that is not how I started. I started
| with 1 hour first thing every morning Monday to Friday to
| teach them the basics and get them inspired. If they
| seemed drained, or I sensed that they needed a break, I
| just let them have a day off.
|
| We also play erion mud [3] and sometimes hexonyx [4]
| because I wanted them to understand what a mud is all
| about and to build up interest. I am really into text-
| based games, so not surprisingly we play nethack (rogue
| like) [5]. I am also into interactive fiction and started
| them off on Adventure [6]. If you are interested in
| interactive fiction, then you might enjoy reading "Twisty
| Little Passages - an approach to interactive fiction" by
| Nick Montfort [7].
|
| Full disclosure, I believe that the main reason I am able
| to pull this all off is that my wife and I home-school
| our children. It is a challenge though. Very few families
| where we are from are similar to us in our philosophy of
| technology and education.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Raspberry-Cooling-
| Cooler-Heat...
|
| [2] https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm
|
| [3] https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot
|
| [4] https://www.erionmud.com/
|
| [5] https://mud.hexonyx.com/
|
| [6] https://www.nethack.org/
|
| [7] https://quuxplusone.github.io/Advent/play.html
|
| [8] https://www.amazon.com/Twisty-Little-Passages-
| Approach-Inter...
| em-bee wrote:
| i participated in the OLPC program as a tester, and i had
| access to a bunch of devices (after buying my own in the
| initial fundraising campaign).
|
| for a while i used the OLPC XO 1.0 and later 1.5 as a daily
| driver when on the road. most of the work i was doing was
| on the terminal, but i used the occasional activities. the
| browser of course, the camera, and others.
|
| i strongly disagree that the interface is dumbed down. it
| may look toy like, but it serves its purpose.
|
| the initial screen is just an application starter. i see no
| difference in that to any others on a standard desktop. the
| terminal and the source of all activities are available.
| and the actual inner working of the computer are
| accessible.
|
| there is even a switch to switch from the sugar desktop to
| a normal one, and back.
|
| the only valid argument would be, to ask what is the
| benefit of a different interface, as opposed to using a
| traditional one. but with that argument we are throwing out
| the idea of innovating on interfaces. and also a similar
| argument is used in many places to push schools to teach
| windows, as if it was important that kids learn to work
| with the most used interface only.
|
| arguing about the interface is not helpful. if the
| interface works, it's good. kids need to learn concepts,
| and understand that computers do not all have to look and
| work the same way. a child that learns using the sugar
| interface and later a traditional interface, will learn and
| understand much more about computers and interfaces than a
| child that only learns a traditional interface, and then as
| an adult gets confused when presented with something
| different because it hasn't learned the actual concepts.
|
| it can also be argued that as a project sugar is
| overengineered, because it solves problems (like activity
| isolation) a traditional desktop doesn't (but in reality,
| more and more needs to do too). but retroactively the same
| argument could be made for things like squeak, which btw
| was also available on the OLPC, because it is so different
| from a standard desktop. to be clear, squeak is not
| overengineered, but it looks that way from the perspective
| of todays interfaces, since it duplicates all the dev tools
| instead of using familiar ones. which is the same problem
| that sugar is being accused of.
|
| the other side of the argument however is that sugar is
| what we get if we allow developers and interface designers
| free reign in creating something new.
|
| so to me, sugar does not represent a dumbed down interface.
| but it represents innovation. and whether it is better or
| not should be evaluated on that metric, and not on the
| metric of how different it is from what we already know.
| Rygian wrote:
| We should be treating sugar as an addictive, crave-inducing
| substance. See for example
| https://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-sugar-addiction
| ramblenode wrote:
| Sugar is basically the recreational drug of children. It's
| normalized, but it's known to be addictive and harmful if
| consumed in excess (which it frequently is).
|
| Society is now starting to recognize the addictive and
| harmful potential of digital/smartphone overconsumption in
| children. To name a digital children's product "sugar" evokes
| (to me) digital addiction, the attention economy, and how
| children need to get off their phones.
|
| I don't read too much into names, but the branding does feel
| a bit obtuse at this cultural moment.
| Shorel wrote:
| I simply see it as search word-space collision.
|
| In the future, whenever I search for "sugar" I will have to
| deal with hundreds of unrelated results for a programming
| language.
|
| I see the same issue with go, d, eclipse, and a few other
| overloaded words.
|
| This is also the reason why xkcd is such a great name.
| walthamstow wrote:
| High Fructose Corn Syrup is already taken :D
| jajko wrote:
| Came to say exactly this... you want to get kids productive and
| head in good direction, so you name the tool for that as
| outright the worst possible thing they can eat. Because if you
| say 'lets do a bit of sugar now' kids will not immediately
| associate it with and imagine such junkiest food, not at all.
| Heck even for me as an adult my brain is just too quick.
|
| Absolutely worst, and brutally addictive. I am sorry but
| that's... looking for polite word... and failing to find one as
| a parent.
|
| Can I have some Heroin text editor, while writing back in my
| Cocaine email client, storing on Meth cluster? Of course all
| signed and verified by Fentanyl certificate store.
|
| There are literally 200k+ words in just 1 single language. Lets
| be a bit more creative (or compose name out of 2+ words to
| steer meaning at least a bit).
| delichon wrote:
| Think of it as syntactic sugar and it kind of works, as in
| "some of this syntactic sugar makes it a lot easier to code."
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Indeed, it is a terrible name! I feel very strongly. I would
| never point my kids to something like this.
| toolslive wrote:
| worst name since "Office in a rack(TM)" ("I don't want no
| office in Iraq, son").
|
| Well, actually, for French speaking people, I guess "systemd"
| is worse.
| lproven wrote:
| > Well, actually, for French speaking people, I guess
| "systemd" is worse.
|
| Pourquoi?
| toolslive wrote:
| (From Wikipedia) Systeme D. The letter D refers to any one
| of the French nouns debrouille,[3] debrouillardise[4] or
| demerde (French slang). The verbs se debrouiller and se
| demerder
| lproven wrote:
| Aha! Merci.
| sersi wrote:
| It's a neat project and great that it's opensource. I'm not an
| expert though but when I compare this to Educational apps from my
| childhood like Adibou or Castle of Dr Brain, it seems the
| activities are not as fun with the exception of Scratch (but
| that's external).
|
| I'm actually curious if there's research on how learning is
| impacting by the presentation of the material and how fun the
| activities are. Naively, I'd think those old educational software
| I've seen worked better because by being fun, they encouraged the
| child to try and solve puzzles, do activities longer.
|
| I have a child who is soon going to be 3 and I'd like to let him
| play some educational software 30 minutes a week or so so I'm
| actually actively interested in figuring what is something that's
| good, fun and has the most positive impact. So if anyone has some
| relevant studies etc... I'm all ears
| IanCal wrote:
| I don't have studies but we found that "teach your monster to
| read" was great and enjoyed. It's UK focussed, about learning
| to read phonetics. It's essentially a series of mini-games
| tying a story together, and it was very engaging for my son at
| a similar age.
|
| Also it's a one off purchase. (Edit - on android, free online
| it seems)
|
| If that's not as relevant for you where you are, it might give
| some jumping off points for finding more like it
|
| https://www.teachyourmonster.org/teachyourmonstertoread
| rekado wrote:
| > the activities are not as fun with the exception of Scratch
| (but that's external).
|
| Sugar has the TurtleArt activity, which is very much like
| Scratch but with the LOGO turtle:
| https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/turtleart.html
|
| My 4+ year-old doesn't seem to mind the amount of fun in these
| activities; the rather boring-looking Maze activity is a
| current favorite. That said, I do think that many of the
| activities in the catalogue have a user interface that I find
| alienating or somewhat ugly.
| sersi wrote:
| I loved LOGO as a kid, my father was a teacher and he had a
| robotic LOGO turtle mounted with a pen that could be used to
| trace on A3 paper. Lot's of fun but that was more around 6
| years old or so.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| Siblings and I were given Castle of Doctor Brain at too young
| an age to make much progress. It took a long time for us to
| figure out the puzzle on the door to get into the castle, but
| it must have had some strong appeal for us to keep coming back.
| We got stuck plenty of times after that too.!
|
| Looked it up for nostalgia and found we must have been
| inadvertently been playing on a harder difficulty. Feel
| somewhat vindicated.
| https://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Dr._Brain/Outsid...
| lathiat wrote:
| GCompris is a fantastic bit of open source educational
| software: https://www.gcompris.net/index-en.html
| anewhnaccount2 wrote:
| I don't know about studies, but as a parent of a slightly older
| kid, it's 90s edutainment all the way. Zoombinis, PJ Sam,
| Crystal Rainforest...
| sersi wrote:
| Nice, I love Humongous so knew about PJ Sam (and plan to play
| Putt Putt together with him) but didn't know Zoombinis and
| Crystal Rainforest. Any other recommendations?
| jodoherty wrote:
| PBS Kids has a lot of games and activities on their website:
|
| https://pbskids.org/games
|
| If your kids watch any PBS shows them they'll recognize the
| characters.
|
| The activities were fun enough for our twins to learn how to
| use computer mice at age 3.
|
| Tux Paint is also really fun for young kids and a good way to
| learn mouse usage:
|
| https://tuxpaint.org/
| sersi wrote:
| Thanks for the Tux Paint suggestion, I played a lot with Kid
| Pix as a kid and it seems that Tux Paint is similar :)
|
| Haven't looked at the PBS shows yet, right now our son has
| been rather obsessed in a BBC show called Maddie do you know?
| because it explains how things works and he's excited to see
| train tracks, helicopters etc... He also really liked Mickey
| Clubhouse which has the advantage of being translated in
| Cantonese (my wife's language).
| Animats wrote:
| Hung at new account creation.
|
| Got past that, stuck because it demands to use third-party
| cookies.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _stuck because it demands to use third-party cookies_
|
| So like 99% of the mainstream web?
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I thought browsers now block 3rd party cookies, in some cases
| by default?
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/goodbye-third-
| party...
| Animats wrote:
| It's been a Firefox option to block them for a decade, and
| I've had them blocked for that long. Maybe 2%-3% of sites
| fail, and I've yet to find a site worth unblocking.
| pests wrote:
| Then when they grow up they can upgrade to Crack by CrackLabs.
| rekado wrote:
| You can install the Sugar desktop on Guix System, too. I have a
| little netbook with Guix System + Sugar that my kid uses.
| walterbender wrote:
| There is a pretty decent overview of Sugar buried in this video
| about One Laptop per Child. We've continued to maintain the
| platform since 2006. It runs really well on on hardware. Many of
| the activities are available stand-alone in FlatPak. There is a
| browser version called Sugarizer. And there are some Sugar Labs
| activities for the web, such as Music Blocks.
|
| Regarding the comment that kids like computers (and will learn to
| use them without needing any special enticement), I couldn't
| agree more. Alan Kaye has been saying as much since the 1970s.
| But that said, while kids can learn to use computers, are they
| learning to use computers to learn? The latter is the goal of
| Sugar: to make the path of least resistance be one where kids
| engage with powerful ideas while constructing (not being
| instructed -- they already have plenty of that in their lives).
| So most of the activities are about building things. And the
| Sugar Journal is a vehicle for reflection on what they have
| built.
|
| Rather than condescending to kids, we empower them: Sugar is not
| just "open source". The kids are only one mouse-click away from
| seeing the source code of whatever activity they are engaged in.
| And Sugar provides affordances for the kids to then modify the
| code -- taking full ownership of their tools. Not every kid goes
| this deep into Sugar, but many do.
| walterbender wrote:
| Forgot to include the link:
| https://youtu.be/zZ7qkZkp57c?si=1u0VQUQFAUsvMg7B
| Vinnl wrote:
| Wow, so that's 18 years of maintenance and counting, congrats!
|
| Presumably, that means that there are also people who are
| adults now and got started with Sugar. Are you collecting
| testimonials by them anywhere? That would be fun to read.
| akumetsu wrote:
| On my first day of my first job I was led around the office and
| introduced to my new colleagues, who were all sitting at their
| workstations. Then I was given my own and this was running on it.
| They all claimed this was the normal look and watched me try to
| figure out what was happening, lovely memories
| tazu wrote:
| I tried the demo and it seems like this is built for
| exclusively for children, so was that some kind of hazing?
| yadaeno wrote:
| Im in my late 20s and I find the "one laptop per child" thing to
| be insane. It seems like we abandoned hundreds of years of
| education tradition overnight to sell a few extra chromebooks
| with zero consideration of the downsides.
|
| Is anyone familiar with how much of the time learning is spent on
| the Chromebook? Is this normal in other countries?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| 1 - olpc / Sugar isn't a Chromebook _at all_ , it's a learning
| OS meant for builders first, consumers second
|
| 2 - olpc was as much about making computing hardware cheaply
| and as accessible as possible to communities that didn't have
| any access to reliable electricity, let alone computers. Hence
| the built in hand crank
|
| 3 - to my knowledge, olpc distributed globally, but hardly
| addressed US or EU countries at all, so I'm not sure what you
| mean by "is this normal in other countries."
| rincebrain wrote:
| Nit - the crank was a prototype but it didn't ship on any
| models, because it turned out to not work well, and it turns
| out that places where people can't afford much technology,
| people also don't have that much spare energy to spend on
| hand cranking things.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Thanks for this...tbh I haven't actually followed the
| project since about 2008
| dylan-m wrote:
| To be fair, OLPC was accidentally _instrumental_ in making
| people buy cheap small laptops. The Eee PC netbook emerged
| very soon after the OLPC, and it was definitely responding to
| peoples ' interest in the OLPC - particularly from the "Give
| one get one" program. The Eee PC became netbooks, which were
| eventually strangled to death by Chromebooks.
|
| The OLPC project said "we can help kids by designing $100
| laptops just for them", and rich westerners heard "$100
| laptops."
|
| The mistakes happened way in the beginning, along with a
| certain economic downturn. In retrospect, the interest of
| (on-average) wealthy people in cheap disposable laptops was
| _obscene_ , and it's a shame the market allowed that interest
| to be entertained the way it was. Netbooks happened because
| we are incapable of accounting for the long term costs of
| crap electronics outside of futile attempts to educate
| consumers. Thus, netbooks and then equally disposable
| Chromebooks were dumped into the market without scrutiny, and
| computers are Google now.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| That is indeed a fair point. I find it hard to fault OLPC
| for these dynamics however. OLPC had a real "hacker"
| mentality to it in the best senses of the word. It's easy
| to see the missteps in retrospect, but hard to see how they
| could have ended up anywhere else given the moment in time
| cwoolfe wrote:
| And it runs on Raspberry Pi! https://www.sugarlabs.org/sugar-for-
| raspberry-pi/
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