Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
2009/1/10 Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de:
On 10.01.2009, at 14:18, Karl Ramberg wrote:
Hi, hearing the news that much of the Sugar dev team is fired I now wonder if there is any point in working on Sugar integration anymore. I have started on a JournalMorph where one could obtain pictures and sounds etc. from the Journal to link in or import into a project, but now I have slight doubts about if there is any use for such a thing ? Do you guys have any thoughts on the future ?
OLPC is *not* abandoning Sugar. On the contrary, Sugar is becoming available not only on the XO but on more Linux distributions, too.
I don't buy on that think Sugar on Linux. Not only to develop educative software for linux you have to be very motivated (tiny user base), and I know that for years of personal involvement as a developer to promote linux for education, but then you will still have to be even more motivited to port to Sugar because you will have to adapt your software for an even smaller user base in linux, and for benefice not obvious for me, as an educator. From a developer point of view it looks to me as fragmentation and not exciting at all. I prefer the very comforable Smalltalk based world to write application I know can communicate easily with each other. DonĀ“t forget that if you want developer to buy and invest on it, they need something back in return. Developers do not grow like mushroom. A few years ago, I personally invest resources on Smalltalk because I saw great possibilities of innovation, this is what I got back in return.
May be Etoys was not capable to sell itself as this underneath thing to develop on top of it educative activities. See for example how ungood is the DrGeo shipment for XO, an interactive artifact developped on Smalltalk.
Karl, I think your contribution for kids around the world could be very valuable if you could develop interactive artifacts as the ones I mentioned earlier http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/2008/05/01/Operational-thinking
Whatever the host, whatever the UI, they can use it, and it is what matter first.
One of my main issues with Logo was that the artifacts created could not be used further on, they where drawings, not objects. I would like to design a cool spaceship in Logo and then use that in a space game, so that the Logo drawing would be a beginning of a bigger project, not the end of one. Squeak can do this. This is what make it exiting for me. Squeak have quite a few rough edges but most of them are approachable and solvable.
As for learning environments I started out on C64 computers and found them totally captivating and spent countless hours on them. But I realize I'm not a average student and a C64 would be a brick for most people. They where quite perfect for me and the possibilities seemed countless and when people got all exited over IBM pc's I could not understand them, PC seemed dull and unimaginative.
Karl
Karl
I watched a