Mar 11, 2017
SUGAR - A MUST HAVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
What is Sugar?
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.
So take “sugar” as a tool that collect bunch of learning Activities (Not Application) in one place. Below are some list of fun Activities available in Sugar OS
Scratch Foundation Scratch — Scratch is a free visual programming language developed by the MIT Media Lab, which you can easily create animations, games and Control Robots like LEGO MINDSTORMS!
visit Scratch official website to get started.
Music Blocks
Music Blocks software is Free/Libre Software designed for teachers and learners to explore the fundamental concepts of music in a fun, scalable, and open-ended visual-coding environment.
Click here to learn more about Music Blocks
Turtle Blocks (AKA Turtle Art)
what is Turtle Blocks (AKA Turtle Art)? Turtle Blocks is an activity with a Logo-inspired graphical “turtle” that draws colorful art based on snap-together visual programming elements. Its “low floor” provides an easy entry point for beginners. It also has “high ceiling” programming features which will challenge the more adventurous student.
There are lot of things you can do with Turtle Blocks ranging from creating awesome artworks, program robots like LEGO MINDSTORM, do advanced math, translations, Dictionary, check weather forecasts, and finance.
Click here to visit the official webpage of Turtle Blocks
There are lot of activities in Sugar you can play with or learn from.
Fun Facts
Sugar OS is very fun and educative to use in day to day learning, both Children and Adult can engage learning with Sugar .
Sugar is owned and maintained by Sugar Labs, a non-profit organization that is under Software Freedom Conservancy, meaning you can create, localize and remix your own activity for free.
Sugar OS is good in terms of collaborative learning.
Different ways you can run Sugar OS.
“Sugar OS” comes pre-installed on any One Laptop Per Child XO laptops see link
Sugar is available as a desktop environment on GNU/Linux. Up to date packages are available for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and many other distros.
Sugar on a Stick — The full Sugar environment — on any computer at any time — from a thumb drive. Learn about how to create a Sugar Stick.
Sugar on a Stick requires a thumb drive with at least 2GB storage and downloading ~650MB. Sugar on a Stick is available for free and does not permanently affect your computer.
Did you also know that A TASTE “Sugar OS” on every device is now possible thanks to “Sugarizer”.
What is 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 re-implements 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:
- No installation required
- Sugar Home View
- Sugar Journal
- Sugar Presence
- Sugar Collaboration
- Sugar Home view (Radial and List)
- Runs any Sugar Web Activity from a Sugarizer Server
Visit Sugarizer from here.
