XO's learning software goes walkabout

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 29 Apr 2009 at 11:19

Sugar Labs has launched a beta version of its Sugar Learning interface designed to run directly from a USB memory stick.

The Sugar software was originally created for the OLPC's XO laptop, and features a circular icon-based interface packed with educational games and software.

The project is now being maintained by Sugar Labs which has a mandate to expand the community around the open-source project and bring it to a wider audience of users.

As part of this it has created Sugar on a Stick, a version of the software running on top of the Fedora 11 beta which can be booted from a 1GB USB thumb drive, which is also used to store the user's data.

Among the new features, potentially the most interesting is the InfoSlicer tool, which allows teachers to take slices of online content such as Wikipedia pages, edit them, package them and present them to students for offline use. The beta also features a new integrated IRC client and a command terminal.

The Sugar Learning Platform also allows makes no bones about attempting to interest students in programming. The source code for the apps is viewable through a source code utility, and there's also a visual programming environment.

"Sugar is perfectly suited for children in the classroom with its simple, colourful interface, built-in collaboration, and open architecture," says Walter Bender, executive director of Sugar Labs.

"Sugar on a Stick lets you start a computer with Sugar and store a child's data on the stick without touching the host computer's hard disk. Sugar's Activities such as Write, a shared word processor, and the recently announced InfoSlicer Activity, which enables teachers to easily collect and package web-based content for the classroom, benefit fully from Sugar's collaboration features."