Caroline Meeks and Sugar on a Stick, Seacoast LUG, 8-Feb-2010

[Ted Roche]

The Seacoast Linux User Group[1] met last night, as they always do on 
the second Monday of the month, in Morse Hall Room 301 on the UNH Durham 
campus, at 7 PM. Kudos to Robert Anderson who's been running the group… 
well, forever. Sixteen people attended last night's very interesting 
meeting, which featured Caroline Meeks speaking on “Sugar on a Stick.”

Caroline's been involved in Open Source since 1999 and is very 
interested in education. Her business, Solution Grove [2] specializes in 
Open Source learning and knowledge management. She's currently studying 
at Harvard Graduate School of Education and plans to complete her 
Masters in Education this year. She spoke (and demoed) enthusiastically 
about the activities available on Sugar and the remarkable effects they 
had on kids, leading to very positive educational outcomes.

Sugar on a Stick[3], a project from Sugar Labs[4], is an effort that 
puts the Sugar desktop (started on the One Laptop Per Child machines) 
onto a USB stick so an educational computer is available to a child any 
time they can access a computer. (SugarLabs is a spinoff open source 
project, with it's own Sugar Labs Oversight Board (yes, SLOBS) and an 
all-volunteer force.) Caroline presented what Sugar on a Stick can do 
now, how it's working in and out of schools, discussed the technical 
hurdles they are running into and made an appeal for help in 
testing/debugging/building, especially on Ubuntu's project, the Sugar 
Remix[5].

Sugar on a Stick addresses the Achille's Heel of the One Laptop Per 
Child program: despite a number of successful pilot programs, most 
deployments of OLPC haven't resulted in each child having their own 
computer that they could keep with them, take home safely and use 
fulltime. When children have to share computers, or only get an hour at 
the lab, they are missing out. Sugar on a Stick lets the kids take their 
USB sticks with them and use them in whatever computer is handy. They 
can run their projects on Mom or Dad's computer without harming that 
machine (or vice versa!) and can play whenever a machine is available.

Some games and educational programs don't work at improving outcomes. 
One attendee cited an example of a well-known reader game. A study 
revealed that scores went _down_ after six months of using the reading 
program. The attendee referred to it as the “Drill and Kill” syndrome.

There's lots of work that needs to be done on the project. The current 
version, based on Fedora's Live stack, was developed in an era of much 
smaller capacity USB sticks and made compromises that aren't needed any 
more. The compressed filesystem is suspected of being a problem with the 
corrupted stick phenomenon, which occurs too often to consider the 
project “ready for prime time.” Caroline said that, with a classroom of 
kids working Sugar on a Stick, there would always be one or two 
corrupted sticks. That's too much data loss, too much frustration and 
disappointment, and too much disruption to be suitable for a classroom 
environment.

SugarLabs need mentors (those of us in LUGs) to finish making the 
software work. There's not a lot of money in it right now, although they 
are looking at all possible grant sources. There's a lot of enthusiastic 
high school students who need help pointing them in the right direction. 
College students have an opportunity to use a “Do Something” grant to 
provide compensation for working on this project. The call to action is 
for mentors and those familiar with the internals of Linux, especially 
Ubuntu's live media functionality, to coach, mentor, supervise and help 
out in getting the next version of Sugar on a Stick, the Ubuntu Sugar Remix.

Prezi[6] was the presentation software Caroline was using. It was pretty 
neat. Her presentation can be found at: 
http://prezi.com/kuuhqwmkxxtm/[7] Caroline's presentation and 
demonstration were quite impressive, and her obvious enthusiasm for the 
project lead to an energetic question-and-answer session at the end.

Thanks to Caroline for the presentation, to Robert and UNH for hosting 
and all for attending and participating!

[1] http://slug.gnhlug.org
[2] http://www.solutiongrove.com/
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
[4] http://www.sugarlabs.org/
[5] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuSugarRemix
[6] http://prezi.com/
[7] http://prezi.com/kuuhqwmkxxtm/