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== Sun, Mar 14 - What are kids using Sugar for? ==

I'm finally back in Asuncíon. Over the last few days, I had the
opportunity to interview a dew dozen children who had been
using Sugar 0.82 for about one year. Perhaps the most interesting
and controversial finding was which activities are the most
popular among them:

{{podium.jpg|maxwidth=640|class=thumbright|The most popular Sugar activities}}

 # [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game) | Doom]]
 # [[http://www.pixelprospector.com/indev/2009/12/super-vampire-ninja-zero/ | Super Vampire Ninja Zero]]
 # [[http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4024 | Navegar]] (Browse)

Heh, at least Browse made the third place, I thought. But when I
asked what websites they were visiting, the answer was invariably
"videos".

Well, at the least I could tell they were answering honestly!
We often idealize our young users as being creative, passionate and
eager to learn just about everything. Some kids are really
like this, I met some in Caacupé. However, the naked truth is that the
vast majority would rather spend their free time playing.


=== Those inappropriate games ===

{{http://diablobasher.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/doom01.jpg|class=thumbleft|The Ultimate Doom title artwork}}

It's no wonder kids like the game which, according to the Wikipedia, is "//widely regarded as one of
the most important titles in gaming history//". This is no exaggeration: the first 7 hits for the
common word "[[http://www.google.com/search?q=doom|doom]]" are about the game itself. Then come
the film adaptation and various fan sites.
Anyway, how can we blame kids for playing games? After all, many of us played
Doom and many other types of "inappropriate" video games throughout our childhood.

We quickly took Doom down from the OLPC wiki soon after it was uploaded,
yet it is still spreading fast among Sugar users worldwide. Let's look at the
positive sides: it shows social behavior and encourages kids to find technical
solutions to transfer activities directly (their old version of Sugar does not
allow direct sharing from the journal).

So, what to do now? Do we lock the entire system down so that kids could
only install applications that we approve? So much for the "child ownership"
principle.

Do we develop a couple of boring educational games, in the hope they will keep
our kids from playing the "//#1 game of all time//"? I'm sure that will work :-)

How about admitting defeat and giving them the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_WAD|level editor]]
too? It could redirect some of the existing passion towards learning about advanced concepts
of 3D graphics and game deisgn. Don't underestimate the latent creativity of gamers: over 13,000 original maps
were created for Doom by young artits of any age and nationality. Later games from ID Software included
a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuakeC | programming language]] which enabled users to create entire
new games with relative ease.

**Update**: my colleague [[http://selfdotblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/selfpresentation.html | Marten Abente]],
author of the 3G broadband support in Sugar, noted that he had been creating [[http://selfdotblog.blogspot.com/ | many game maps]]
when he was just 16. At the university, he worked with a friend to creat an entire 3D game engine from scratch
using [[http://www.libsdl.org/ | SDL]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL | OpenGL]].


=== Those inappropriate cartoons ===

{{http://www.shoemoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/blame-canada.jpg|class=thumbright|Still from South Park}}


What about the videos? The most popular video websites are
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash | Flash]] based.
You Tube would work with [[http://www.gnashdev.org/ | Gnash]] as well,
but because the required video codecs are [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues | patent encumbered]],
we're not allowed to ship them in Fedora.  Besides,
both Flash and Gnash are quite inefficient and would feel
sluggish on the XO-1.

So I am left wondering what solutions these kids came up with
in order to circumvent the technical limitations and watch
their favorite videos.

The coordinator of the education team got curious and asked questions.
It seems that some smart kids figured out how to rip videos from You Tube,
store them in the journal, and then play them back with some
[[http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/using_an_xo_laptop_a.html | clever hackery]].
We do not know the details of how this is done, but it is quite impressive.

=== Passion-driven learning ===

Even though most kids are inclined to misuse our precious educational
technology for gaming and other mundane uses, in order to do what they want,
they seem to be acquiring pretty advanced problem-solving abilities
in a self-motivated and social way; in other words, the purpose for which
OLPC and Sugar were created.


== Fri, Mar 12 - Interview with //Los Scratcheros// ==

(photos courtesy of Carla Crosa)

|| {{ 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 }} ||

Today I spent some time with three siblings of Caacupé who has impressed me and the educators very
much with their original creations in Scratch. Scratch is not a school subject, these kids are
learning it on their own driven by their own passion.

 * **What's your name?**
 * B: Benedicto
 * N: Nadia
 * A: Alberto

 * **How old are you?**
 * B: 12
 * N: 11
 * A: 9

 * **How did you learn Scratch?**
 * B: We tried all the functions. First, we'll try one function, and see what it does.
 * N: Like he said, we experimented with all the functions and check the results.
 * A: By looking at the animations of the games bundled with Scratch

 * **What job would you like to do when you're done with school?**
 * B: Software engineer
 * N: Paediatrician
 * A: Nada... ;-)

 * **Do you like Turtle Art? What can you do with it?**
 * B: Si. I can create rectangles and other geometrical shapes.
 * N: Mostly geometric shapes 
 * A: Only basic shapes: square, triangle...

 * **How much time do you spend with your laptop every day?**
 * B: A few hours.
 * N: 6 hours, more or less.
 * A: Same for me.
 * (Mother's note: they don't use the laptop enough in school!)

 * **Nobody is teaching you, yeah? You're learning everything on your own?**
 * B: No, with my sister. We try all activities, and when we find one we like, we spend some time on it together.
 * N: I learned the basics of Turtle Art at the trainer's course.
 * A: Yes, I learned it there too.

 * **What other activities do you like besides Scratch and Turtle Art?**
 * B: //Hablar con Sara// [Speak] and //Super Vampire Ninja Zero//, //Máquina de discos// (Jukebox).
 * N: //eToys//, to edit photos. I need someone to teach me all the rest.
 * A: //Grabar// (Record), to take videos, interview people...

 * **What would you like to add to Sugar?**
 * B: The "Snake" game
 * N: Strategic games
 * A: ...hmm...
 * (Mom: They need an automatic spell checker... and a **screensaver**, of course).

 * **What's the most annoying problem for you with Sugar?**
 * B: Can't use the "robot" function in //Hablar con Sara// (
 * N: I want bigger fonts in //Pintar// (Paint).
 * A: //Escribir// (Write ;-)

 * **Would you like to learn a little bit of Python with Pippy?**
 * B: Very well!

Then Benedicto and I got started. Python is easy, you can explain the basics to a smart kid in less than 30 minutes.
I've shown him a few Pippy examples, describing the code briefly before running it, then making small changes to make
Benedicto grasp the possibilities. From his questions and comments, I'm pretty sure that he could figure out the
concepts despite my very poor Spanish fluency and my usual disorganized style.

Nadia shows plenty of design talent: she uses Sugar to create short stories featuring her friends. She
cookie-cuts their photos and uses Scratch to animate them on fantasy backgrounds with music, sound
effects and text. Recently, she started creating line-art versions of the photos using eToys, so her
new creations look more like cartoons. At this point, Benedicto mentioned the [[http://htf.atom.com/ | Happy Tree Friends]],
an innocently named Internet series which makes even South Park seem politically correct in comparison!
HTF is Flash-only and doesn't seem to work with Gnash -- at least, we should be above any bigot criticism
for conveying "inapprorpiate content" to young hack^Wchildren.

Nadia also created a platform videogame in which a dog needs to jump around to find the way out from
each level, while a bouncing arrow chases him. Technically simple, but shows sensitive use of
game-design principles. I'm not sure if the code is entirely new or comes in part from pre-existing
Scratch games. It doesn't matter: in Free Software, remixing other people's work is the rule.

We updated Benedicto's and Nadia's laptops to [[http://oficina.paraguayeduca.org/~bernie/py-xo1/ | F11-XO1 Paraguay, build 65]],
which contains the latest release of [[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.84/Notes | Sugar 0.84]]. Benedicto had been previously
testing my build 45, revealing some bugs in networking and activities.

|| {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/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 }} ||


== Mon, Mar 8 - Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reasons ==

|| {{ 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 waiting to install Sugar 0.84 in front of the CATS lab }} ||

The owner of **Centro de Assistencia Tecnica y Soporte (CATS)**, the XO support center of
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caacup%C3%A9 | Caacupé]], wrote:

{{{
On March 8 2010 14:51, Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés wrote:
> Fernando,
>
> How is the migration to Fedora 11 going so far? Approximate number
> of machines to date?

Raul, the truth that it's going smooth so far, the boys are very excited
about the new version, and the rumor is spreading fast.
I think so far my team updated 120 laptops, more or less.

FG
}}}

(Google translation with my manual corrctions)

I witnessed it with my own eyes: every day, children start lining up outside of CATS' door
early in the morning, and keep coming all day long, until the evening. All of them ask
for the new version, bui in interesting ways: a little boy said:

 "//Quiero poner ventanas coloradas//" (I want to install colored windows).

They're obviously referring to the Gnome desktop, also known as "//salva pantallas//" (screensaver).
Another kid admired his freshly installed Gnome desktop and proudly declared: "//Ahora tienen Windows!//"
(now I have Windows). In Spanish, therre's no ambiguity on the meaning of the word Windows.

Power of brand. It doesn't rmatter if it's the actual Windows, or even if it really does
anything useful at all. It's new, it's colored and it's what adults are using. Oh, and it
also comes with a screensaver which makes it irresistible.

So, what do we do? Quick! Let's add a cool screensaver to Sugar! :-)

Of course not, but could we do anything to appeal to kids more than a traditional desktop?
I don't claim to be a pedagogist, but by now I've observed our young users closely enough
to be able to guess what they're really missing in Sugar:

<div style="font-size: large; color: red; text-align: center">
more configurability.
</div>

Yeah, dozen of scientific studies showed how users almost never customize the desktops beyond
setting a background image. Kids, however, are a lot more passionate about their precious
laptop than the average office clerk using Windows. They //do// cover the exterior of
their laptops with colorful stickers.

|| {{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) }} ||

Believe it or not, many of these kids also set their Home View with the random icon layout
(aka "the Negroponte layout"), because it lets them drag icons around and arrange them in
clever ways. I could take many screenshot to prove it, but I particulatily like this one
abusing Sugar's user name field to create a drawing on three lines. These kids do not live
in the middle of Silicon Valley; it is very likely that they rediscovered the technique
of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art | ASCII art]] completely on their own.
The original idea was passed along and successively refined by several anonymous artists.

Finally, what was the gray-scale palette supposed to mean in our UI? I was explained it once,
and it seemed to make some sense, but now I forgot. And, whatver the reason was, kids are
unlikely to agree with us.

Let's give our users a control panel applet for customizing colors as they wish, or they'll
switch to Gnome //en masse//. I can't blame them, either. What would you have done when
you were 8?


== Tue, Mar 02 - Charla @ Facultad Politecnica ==

Today I gave an opening talk at the [[http://www.pol.una.py/ | Facultad Politecnica de la Universidad Nacional de Asuncion]].
The title was "//Empoderar a los estudiantes con el Software Libre//" (//Empowering students with Free Software//).

 * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/sugar-paraguay-v6-es.odp | Spanish, OpenDocument]] 
 * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/sugar-paraguay-v6-es.pdf | Spanish, PDF]]
 * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/sugar-paraguay-v5-en.odp | English, OpenDocument]] (older version with fewer slides and some factual errors)

|| {{ 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 }} ||
|| {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/00043.jpg | maxwidth=500 }}                       || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/00048.jpg | maxwidth=500 }}                        ||

See [[pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica | all the photos ]] in my Codew'z photostream.

Note: I'm not really affiliated with MIT and I'm not even an engineer, but it's a flattering mistake ;-)