Activities

Features

What makes Sugar different?

• Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration: Children can write, share books, or make music together with a single mouse-click.
• Activities, not applications: Sugar activities are applicable beyond the scope of the classroom or even Sugar itself.
• Automatic backup of Activity work; no worrying about files or folders. Sugar’s Journal makes it almost impossible to lose any data.
• The Journal records everything you do: It is a place to reflect upon and evaluate your work.
• Sugar runs on most computer hardware, including slower machines.
• Sugar is Free (Libre) Software: It is written in the modern Python language and easily customized.
• Sugar is documented by its users: It is easy to use and teachers worldwide have created a wealth of pedagogical materials for it.
• Sugar is written by its users: 50% of the updates to our latest release came directly from our users.

What are the benefits of using Sugar?

• Hundreds of tools for discovery through exploring, expressing, and sharing: browsing, writing, etc.
• Built-in collaboration system: peer-to-peer learning; always-on support; and single-click sharing.
• The Journal is a built-in portfolio assessment tool that serves as a forum for discussion between children, parents, and teachers.
• A discoverable learning platform: it uses simple means to reach to complex ends.
• Designed for local appropriation: it has built-in tools for making changes and improvements and a growing global community of support. 25 languages are currently available.
• An emphasis on learning through doing and debugging: more engaged learners are able to tackle authentic problems.
• Available in a wide variety of forms: as part of GNU/Linux distributions; LiveCD, LiveUSB; and in a virtual machine.

What are the Sugar advantages?

• Superior pedagogical framework
• Unique collaboration and journaling (evaluation) features
• Large & successful installed base with hundreds of activities
• Large and committed community base (both developers and teachers)
• 24/7 community support; training and workshop materials available
• Rapidly expanding teacher-driven development
• Easily localizable and customizable
• Free open source software: no licensing fees
• A global project: no single point of dependency or failure
• Great potential for local job creation

Education

The computer can help get new pedagogical approaches into the classroom. While getting computers into the hands of more children is undoubtedly of benefit, the question remains, “how does one maximize the learning that occurs?”

A “learning-centric” approach

The question often is framed in terms of teacher-centric versus child-centric methods. With Sugar, we strive for a “learning-centric” approach, where teachers mentor students as they engage with powerful ideas, “teaching less and learning more.” While we want to give children access to knowledge—through media such as electronic books, the world-wide web, and multimedia—we also want them to acquire this knowledge by putting it to use and engaging in critical dialog. With Sugar, we help learners acquire knowledge by giving them tools that make them consumers, critics, and creators of knowledge; Sugar welcomes them as members of a learning community.

Learning is not a service—it’s a process of active appropriation.

One-to-one computing initiatives—where children have access to computing “anytime” and “anywhere”—is changing in the way software developers and computer-makers think about the education industry. Cross-community collaboration between technologists and teachers ensures that the ideals of freedom, sharing, open critique, and transparency will be part of the interface to learning that touches children in the world’s classrooms.

The Free (Libre) Software culture

These ideas are embodied in the culture of free software, which is a powerful culture for learning. Educators are discovering the culture, technology, and values of the open source movement which engages both teachers and students: empowering them with both the freedom to act and the freedom to be critical. Criticism of ideas is a powerful force in learning and in fostering economic development; unleashing that is an important part of the mission. Teachers are learners too and Sugar provides a way for teachers and students to share. Sugar is based on Constructionism. Like any good theory, Constructionism is accurate on some points, and needs further research on other areas. But what is Constructionism? Is it true? Is it effective? Seymour Papert, the father of constructionism, slyly points out that simply giving a definition would not be a Constructionist way to teach you. Instead he suggests ways in which you can experience what works and what doesn’t in current Constructionist programs. We can be a little more explicit, but the need for experience remains central. In Piaget’s Constructivist theory of child development and learning, based on decades of research with children, understanding is something a child constructs internally out of experience and previous understanding (which in some cases will be misunderstanding), when the child’s brain is sufficiently developed to support the ideas involved. In Constructionist education on computers, “Aha!” moments—in which a child (or adult) who has been working on a problem without insight suddenly gets it—are deliberately fostered. Alan Kay gives examples of ten-year-olds, with appropriate guidance on where and how to look, and appropriate computer software to assist them, discovering essential concepts of calculus, such as the laws of constant acceleration with their geometric realization and their application to physics. The symbol manipulation and formal proofs have to be delayed to a more appropriate developmental stage, of course. Much more common still are opportunities to work together—using Sugar’s collaboration capabilities, built-in to its Activities—to construct something, and to explore all that is known and unknown and share the results. This is what Ivan Krstić told us captured the teachers in Latin America, who were no longer bound to the inadequate textbooks and teaching materials provided by the government. And after the teachers got it, the parents soon got it.

Parents

The Sugar Learning Platform

The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform is a revolutionary new approach to technology and learning. With Sugar’s Activities, your children will engage in exploring knowledge, expressing themselves through writing, drawing, video—even programming the computer. Working collaboratively, they can reflect upon their work and use Sugar to create a portfolio of their accomplishments.

The Journal

With the Sugar Learning Platform, the age-old question “What did you do in school today?” takes on new meaning. Sugar maintains a diary (the Journal) of what they make (nouns), how they make it (verbs), and with whom they are collaborating (proper nouns). You can sit down with your child and walk through the Journal to review progress and leave comments for the teacher.

Activities

The heart of Sugar is its Activities—not applications in the traditional sense, but ways of working and thinking together. Curious children can view the source code of Activities and even try their hand at programming. More traditional Activities such as a web browser, an ebook reader, a multimedia player, and a word processor, open a window to the Web (if connectivity is available), allow dozens or even hundreds of books to be stored and read, rich content to be played back, documents to be composed. Kids love games, and Sugar has several which aid learning and build dexterity. Sugar comes with a rich collection of music Activities, both for playing and composing music, and programming tools that are accessible to child as young as 4-years old, but interesting enough to keep a teenager engaged. A hallmark of Sugar is its simplicity—even pre-schoolers can use the Sugar basics—while putting no upper bound on the complexity of expression to which your child can reach.

Collaboration

Collaboration is fundamental in Sugar. Your child can collaborate with friends, family, and classmates—playing games, chatting, sharing bookmarks, and helping each other with homework.

Try Sugar

You can try Sugar by downloading it to a CD or USB key and then using it to boot your desktop or laptop computer. (Sugar will not change anything on your computer—it uses the USB instead of your hard disk.) You can introduce Sugar to your child’s school using USB sticks as well. With Sugar, children grow into confident, joyful learners and realize their unlimited potentials.

Learners

• Sugar supports sharing and collaboration. Using Sugar, teachers easily share things with their class: books and bookmarks; materials and activities.
• Using Sugar, children collaboratively browse the web. They share links directly within the collaborative browsing sessions.
• Sugar comes with many core activities, including Write, a simple-to-use, collaborative word processor.
• Sugar on a Stick gives children access to their Sugar on any computer—they only need a USB key. At home or the library, they use the USB key on any computer to access their work.
• In the Sugar Neighborhood view, children see their connected friends. Children are shown clustered around their current activities; they can join each other’s activities.
• The Sugar Paint activity provides a canvas for children to express themselves creatively by drawing.
• The Sugar Memorize activity is a game about finding matching pairs of words, images, sounds—even videos. Memorize allows you to create new games yourself.
• The Sugar Journal records everything a child does using Sugar. There is no need to remember to save files. The Journal allows children to focus entirely on their activities.
• Using Sugar, children can chat and exchange objects—pictures, games, writing—with their connected friends.
• Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection. Children develop skills that help them in all aspects of life.

Learn more about how you can try Sugar.

Teachers

Imagine a classroom where instruction is complimented by learners engaged in self-discovery; where collaboration, expression, and reflection are integrated directly into the learning experience.

Through the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform, students appropriate knowledge by engaging in activities that are authentic to them. With Sugar, your students at all skill levels can explore any curriculum goal more deeply. Your students will learn and they will learn to learn.

Your students will enjoy learning more and they will improve in regard to traditional metrics such as reading comprehension. And you will enjoy mentoring them and learning along side them.

Features

Sugar is easy to learn: teachers and students discover how to use Sugar through exploration and collaboration—together, you learn by doing.

Sugar can accommodate a wide variety of students, with different levels of skill in terms of reading, language, and different levels of experience with computing. It is easy to approach, yet it doesn’t put an upper bound on a student’s personal expression.

The Sugar interface always shows a students connected friends. Students chat with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas. Activities such as peer editing are just one “mouse-click” away.

Sugar uses a “Journal” to record each student’s activities: both what they make and how they make it. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress—a portfolio that can be shared with teachers, parents, and the student as they progress through grade levels.

Pedagogy

Based upon 40+ years of educational research at Harvard and MIT, Sugar promotes “studio thinking” through demonstrations, projects, and critiques, as well as “studio habits of mind”, by developing craft, engagement, persistence, expression, observation, reflection, and exploration. In the context of Sugar, studio thinking is applied not just to the arts, but to all disciplines.

Reflective practice involves students applying their own experiences to practice while being mentored by domain experts. In the context of Sugar, the expert could be a teacher, a parent, a community member, or a fellow student.

At the same time, Sugar is flexible; it works coherently with the wide variety of instructional frameworks, deepening the student’s learning experience. Sugar also provides access to internet learning resources.

While Sugar is designed for elementary school classrooms, it will hold the interest of middle schoolers as well.

Getting started

Sugar is a great way to augment your classroom: it is simple; it is powerful; it is boundless; and it is free! Almost nearly 3 million children and tens of thousands of teachers around the world are using Sugar. Learn more about Sugar and how you can be part of the Sugar revolution.

A learning and software-development community

There are many ways you can take an active hand in making Sugar even better. Financial contributions large and small are greatly appreciated and will be used to support grassroots learning innovations and face-to-face meetings between developers and educators. The community is organized into teams. Please join a team in order to help us expand our educational, technical, and community goals.

Education goals

Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community. Thus Sugar Labs is working with educators around the world to focus on these learning challenges:

• To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners everywhere
• To explore and share best practices
• To provide a forum for discussion and support for technology for learning
• To provide a mechanism for evaluation and dissemination of results

Technical goals

Sugar supports the notions that learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.” We focus on solving the challenges that are relevant to these distinct aspects of the interface:

• To make it “simple” to share Sugar activities
• To create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms
• To make it “simple” to write Sugar activities
• To make Sugar activities even more secure

Community goals

Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. Sugar Labs would like to help community members start projects that help sustain and grow the Sugar technology and learning communities:

• To provide local and regional technical and pedagogical support
• To create new learning activities and pedagogical practice
• To provide localization and internationalization of software, content, and documentation
• To provide integration and customization services

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