This document discusses Sugar, an educational desktop environment created by Sugar Labs as a spin-off from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. It provides background on OLPC's goals of providing low-cost laptops to children worldwide, and how Sugar Labs was founded when OLPC shifted focus. Sugar is built using free and open source software, is designed for children's learning needs, and runs on older, slower hardware. It uses a Python-based architecture with components like activities (applications), a shell, journal, and datastore service. Sugar Labs now focuses on expanding Sugar to different platforms and involving more contributors and organizations.

1.
Sugar : An Educational Desktop
( And absolutely not an OS, at least not right now)
Vamsi Krishna D

2.
A brief history

3.
OLPC: How it should have been
● VISION: To create educational
opportunities for the world's poorest
children by providing each child with a
rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected
laptop with content and software designed
for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered
learning.
● Motive: Education is part of the solution
to every problem facing the next
generation. While we can not solve
problems for them, we can give them
tools so that they can become a generation
of problem solvers.
● UNITS SOLD:
● 250,000 April 24, 2009 India (not
confirmed yet)
● 200,000 June 2008 Uruguay
● 260,000 December 1, 2007 Peru
● Support from leading companies such as
Google, Marvell and AMD.

4.
The end, a beginningSugar Labs: The now makers of the Desktop.
● Mr Negroponte felt OLPC should be more
structured and took a few enterprises as an
example.
● A Split from the parent OLPC almost an year
back, due to these changing motives of OLPC.
● W. Bender Feared the GPL nature of Sugar
would be lost.
● Wanted to expand to different platforms.
● Learning should not be closed.
● SL founded by Walter Bender, the man behind
the development of the interface.
● Huge number of contributors from various
Orgs and educational institutions.

5.
Why Sugar?
● As said by the founder himself:
● " (1) Sugar is designed to meet the needs of
young children learning― it puts an emphasis
on guided discovery, collaboration, and
reflection. It is not just a repackaging of an
1970s-inspired office desktop.
● (2) Sugar is built on free and open software
because learning requires more than just access
to knowledge--it also requires the ability to
appropriate knowledge and put it to use. Sugar
encourages and facilitates such appropriation
through mechanisms such as "view source."
● (3) Sugar is designed to run on small, old, slow
machines,it can breath new life into existing in
hardware."

6.
The mechanisms

7.
Python: the answer?
● To be easily hacked on.
● To be user/coder friendly.
A Desktop?
● Can focus more on innovation
● Distro maintainers worry about distribution.

8.
The Architecture
● Is made up of components
● 1) Shell: How the user interacts with
Sugar
Two components:
Frame and Home View.
● 2) Activities: Also known as
applications in other envs.
● 3) Shell service : provides backend
services like, activity registry etc.
● 4) Journal: safe house to store
information pertaining activities and
user.

9.
● 5) Datastore service: Services which
let Activities effectively maintain their
data.
● 6) Presence service: A way for
activities to be shared over a network.
● 7) Activity API : Provides means to
write new Activities

10.
The Future

11.
Prescient are we not?
● Community boom.
● Organization restructuring itself.
● Lack of expected user base.
● To become a distro or to remain an upstream
Desktop?