1 == Fri, Mar 12 - Interview with //Los Scratcheros// ==
3 || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/00008.jpg | maxwidth=480 | The "Scratcheros": Nadia, Benedicto and Alberto}} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/1.00011.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Albertito, our youngest volunteer, helping one of our trainers }} ||
5 Today I spent some time with three siblings of Caacupe who has impressed me and the educators very
6 much with their original creations in Scratch. Scratch is not a school subject, these kids are
7 learning it on their own driven by their own passion.
9 * **What's your name?**
14 * **How old are you?**
19 * **How did you learn Scratch?**
20 * B: We tried all the functions. First, we'll try one function, and see what it does.
21 * N: Like he said, we experimented with all the functions and check the results.
22 * A: By looking at the animations of the games bundled with Scratch
24 * **What job would you like to do when you're done with school?**
25 * B: Software engineer
29 * **Do you like Turtle Art? What can you do with it?**
30 * B: Si. I can create rectangles and other geometrical shapes.
31 * N: Mostly geometric shapes
32 * A: Only basic shapes: square, triangle...
34 * **How much time do you spend with your laptop every day?**
36 * N: 6 hours, more or less.
38 * (Mother's note: they don't use the laptop enough in school!)
40 * **Nobody is teaching you, yeah? You're learning everything on your own?**
41 * B: No, with my sister. We try all activities, and when we find one we like, we spend some time on it together.
42 * N: I learned the basics of Turtle Art at the trainer's course.
43 * A: Yes, I learned it there too.
45 * **What other activities do you like besides Scatch and Turtle Art?**
46 * B: //Ablar con Sara// [Speak] and //Super Vampire Ninja Zero//, //Máquina de discos// (Jukebox).
47 * N: //eToys//, to edit photos. I need someone to teach me all the rest.
48 * A: //Grabar// (Record), to take videos, interview people...
50 * **What would you like to add to Sugar?**
54 * (Mom: They need an automatic spell checker... and a **screensaver**, of course).
56 * **What's the most annoying problem for you with Sugar?**
57 * B: Can't use the "robot" function in //Ablar con Sara// (
58 * N: I want bigger fonts in //Pintar// (Paint).
59 * A: //Escribir// (Write ;-)
61 * **Would you like to learn a little bit of Python with Pippy?**
64 Then Benedicto and I got started. Python is easy, you can explain the basics to a smart kid in less than 30 minutes.
65 I've shown him a few Pippy examples, describing the code briefly before running it, then making small changes to make
66 Benedicto grasp the possibilities. From his questions and comments, I'm pretty sure that he could figure out the
67 concepts despite my very poor Spanish fluency and my usual disorganized style.
69 Nadia shows plenty of design talent: she uses Sugar to create short stories featuring her friends. She
70 cookie-cuts their photos and uses Scratch to animate them on fantasy backgrounds with music, sound
71 effects and text. Recently, she started creating line-art versions of the photos using eToys, so her
72 new creations look more like cartoons. To my surprise, Benedicto mentioned the Happy Tree Friends,
73 a splatter-gore cartoon which makes even South Park seem politically correct. Appropriate for his
74 age or not, it's a common hacker trait.
76 Nadia also created a platform videogame in which a dog needs to jump around to find the way out from
77 each level, while a bouncing arrow chases him. Technically simple, but shows sensitive use of
78 game-design principles. I'm not sure if the code is entirely new or comes in part from pre-existing
79 Scratch games. It doesn't matter: in Free Software, remixing other people's work is the rule.
81 We updated Benedicto's and Nadia's laptops to [[http://oficina.paraguayeduca.org/~bernie/py-xo1/ | F11-XO1 Paraguay, build 65]],
82 which contains the latest release of [[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.84/Notes | Sugar 0.84]]. Benedicto had been previously
83 testing my build 45, revealing some bugs in networking and activities.
85 || {{ paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/00005-game-written-in-scratch.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Perro Bros }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/00016-nadias-work-in-etoys.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Nadia's line-art image }} ||
87 == Mon, Mar 8 - Children like Sugar, for the wrong reasons ==
89 || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/cats/00001.jpg | maxwidth=480 | CATS, Fernando's XO repair lab in Caacupe }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/cats/00029.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Kids asking to install Sugar 0.84 in front of Cyber Nick's lab }} ||
91 The owner of **Centro de Assistencia Tecnica y Soporte (CATS)**, the XO support center of
92 [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caacup%C3%A9 | Caacupé]], wrote:
95 On March 8 2010 14:51, Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés wrote:
98 > How is the migration to Fedora 11 going so far? Approximate number
99 > of machines to date?
101 Raul, the truth that it's going smooth so far, the boys are very excited
102 about the new version, and the rumor is spreading fast.
103 I think so far my team updated 120 laptops, more or less.
108 (Google translation with my manual corrctions)
110 I witnessed it with my own eyes: every day, children start lining up outside of CATS' door
111 early in the morning, and keep coming all day long, until the evening. All of them ask
112 for the new version, bui in interesting ways: a little boy said:
114 "//Quiero poner ventanas coloradas//" (I want colored windows).
116 They're obviously referring to the Gnome desktop, also known as "//salva pantallas//" (screensaver).
117 Another kid admired his freshly installed Gnome desktop and proudly declared: "//Ahora tienen Windows!//"
118 (now I have Windows). In Spanish, therre's no ambiguity on the meaning of the word Windows.
120 Power of brand. It doesn't rmatter if it's the actual Windows, or even if it really does
121 anything useful at all. It's new, it's colored and it's what adults are using. Oh, and it
122 also comes with a screensaver which makes it irresistible.
124 So, what do we do? Quick! Let's add a cool screensaver to Sugar! :-)
126 Of course not, but could we do anything to appeal more to kids? By now, I think I've observed
127 our young users closely enough to be able to guess what they're really missing in Sugar:
129 <div style="font-size: large; color: red; text-align: center">
130 more configurability.
133 Yeah, dozen of scientific studies showed how users almost never customize the desktops beyond
134 setting a background image. Kids, however, are a lot more passionate about their precious
135 laptop than the average office clerk using Windows. They //do// cover the exterior of
136 their laptops with colorful stickers.
138 || {{pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/escuela_691_profesora_gudelia_cabrera/00048.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Shy girls hide behind their Barbie-fashioned laptops }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/00003.jpg | maxwidth=480 | A sugar "hack" (zoom in to see the ASCII art detail) }} ||
140 Believe it or not, many of these kids also set their Home View with the random icon layout
141 (aka "the Negroponte layout"), because it lets them drag icons around and arrange them in
142 clever ways. I could take many screenshot to prove it, but I particulatily like this one
143 abusing Sugar's user name field to create a drawing on three lines. These kids do not live
144 in the middle of Silicon Valley; it is very likely that they rediscovered the technique
145 of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art | ASCII art]] completely on their own.
146 The original idea was passed along and successively refined by several anonymous artists.
148 Finally, what was the gray-scale palette supposed to mean in our UI? I was explained it once,
149 and it seemed to make some sense, but now I forgot. And, whatver the reason was, kids are
150 unlikely to agree with us.
152 Let's give our users a control panel applet for customizing colors as they wish, or they'll
153 switch to Gnome //en masse//. I can't blame them, either. What would you have done when
157 == Tue, Mar 02 - Charla @ Facultad Politecnica ==
159 Today I gave an opening talk at the [[http://www.pol.una.py/ | Facultad Politecnica de la Universidad Nacional de Asuncion]].
160 The title was "//Empoderar a los estudiantes con el Software Libre//" (//Empowering students with Free Software//).
162 * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/sugar-paraguay-v6-es.odp | Spanish, OpenDocument]]
163 * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/sugar-paraguay-v6-es.pdf | Spanish, PDF]]
164 * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/sugar-paraguay-v5-en.odp | English, OpenDocument]] (older version with fewer slides and some factual errors)
166 || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/la-base-pedagogica-de-sugar.jpg | maxwidth=500 }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/todos-son-maestros-y-alumnos.jpg | maxwidth=500 }} ||
167 || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/00043.jpg | maxwidth=500 }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/00048.jpg | maxwidth=500 }} ||
169 See [[pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica | all the photos ]] in my Codew'z photostream.
171 Note: I'm not really affiliated with MIT and I'm not even an engineer, but it's a flattering mistake ;-)