Introduction to Sugar

Sugar : An Educational Desktop ( And absolutely not an OS, at least not right now)

Vamsi Krishna D

A brief history

OLPC: How it should have been● VISION: To create educational

opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.

● Motive: Education is part of the solution to every problem facing the next generation. While we can not solve problems for them, we can give them tools so that they can become a generation of problem solvers.

● UNITS SOLD:

● 250,000 April 24, 2009 India (not confirmed yet)

● 200,000 June 2008 Uruguay

● 260,000 December 1, 2007 Peru

● Support from leading companies such as Google, Marvell and AMD.

The end, a beginningSugar Labs: The now makers of the Desktop.

● Mr Negroponte felt OLPC should be more structured and took a few enterprises as an example.

● A Split from the parent OLPC almost an year back, due to these changing motives of OLPC.

● W. Bender Feared the GPL nature of Sugar would be lost.

● Wanted to expand to different platforms.

● Learning should not be closed.

● SL founded by Walter Bender, the man behind the development of the interface.

● Huge number of contributors from various Orgs and educational institutions.

Why Sugar?

● As said by the founder himself:

● " (1) Sugar is designed to meet the needs of young children learning― it puts an emphasis on guided discovery, collaboration, and reflection. It is not just a repackaging of an 1970s-inspired office desktop.

● (2) Sugar is built on free and open software because learning requires more than just access to knowledge--it also requires the ability to appropriate knowledge and put it to use. Sugar encourages and facilitates such appropriation through mechanisms such as "view source."

● (3) Sugar is designed to run on small, old, slow machines,it can breath new life into existing in hardware."

The mechanisms

Python: the answer?

● To be easily hacked on.● To be user/coder friendly.

A Desktop?

● Can focus more on innovation● Distro maintainers worry about distribution.

The Architecture

● Is made up of components

● 1) Shell: How the user interacts with Sugar

Two components: Frame and Home View.

● 2) Activities: Also known as applications in other envs.

● 3) Shell service : provides backend services like, activity registry etc.

● 4) Journal: safe house to store information pertaining activities and user.

● 5) Datastore service: Services which let Activities effectively maintain their data.

● 6) Presence service: A way for activities to be shared over a network.

● 7) Activity API : Provides means to write new Activities

The Future

Prescient are we not?

● Community boom.● Organization restructuring itself.● Lack of expected user base.● To become a distro or to remain an upstream

Desktop?