Choices+for+Project

1. SugarLabs [] SugarLabs is an application on the One Laptop per Child laptops. It provides learning material for children. The wiki gives much information on how to get involved with different development teams. Sugar can be placed on a Flash Drive and run on any computer with that Flash Drive plugged in.
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Sugar Labs is interested in educating more than just those who receive laptops from One Laptop Per Child. They participate in Google Summer of Code to get the word out about coding and opportunities for those interested in learning how to program. Each application that runs on Sugar is called an Activity and these activities involve such things as numbers, drawing, reading and any activity someone requests and pursues to teach a child a meaningful lesson. These activities can be quite complex, as in the Portfolio that allows the users to create slideshows by visually linking the commands like “Wait 5 seconds” and an image. Other Linux applications will also run on a computer running Sugar. Sugar’s openness toward contributors is what pulled us to them. They offer manuals on how to get involved for specific people such as Developers, Educators, Designer and a few more. Also, Sugar understands the time constraints associated with people contributing to open source software as seen in their section “What can I do in an hour?” As developers, there are many different aspects of Sugar that we can work on, including helping to develop a new Activity, testing and debugging the current Activities, and working on the actual infrastructure of Sugar.

2. One laptop per Child [] One laptop per Child is a non for profit organization that provides basic laptops for children 7-12 years old. On these laptops comes SugarLabs and Open Office for Kids. SugarLabs is the platform on which these computers run.

One Laptop Per Child focuses on children who are often overlooked in the computer science community, those who without this program would not have access to a computer at all. Instead of teaching from the standard perspective of a lecturer in front of a class of disinterested students, OLPC wants children to get involved with their own education. However, the software is not presented to them as a necessarily academia-centric tool, but instead a fun toy with a side effect of learning. OLPC saw the need for a new type of GUI tailored to children’s needs, so they created Sugar. OLPC is more than just SugarLabs, though, because they have created the entire structure of the laptops given to these children. Instead of the thin MacBook Air I and my fellow students want, these children need something that is not going to break when it falls out of their backpacks during a race home. Moreover, this organization is not for profit so they must maintain a somewhat low cost for these machines to keep stable. The concept for OLPC comes from MIT faculty members who understand the importance of an early predisposition to learning and how these computers can help bring children in developing countries to a higher level of education.

3. Open Office for Kids [] Open Office for Kids is provided with the One laptop per Child computers. It's functionality is limited to the needs of child 7-12 years old.

Open Office For Kids is designed for children ages 7-12 years old. It has four main functions: Write, Calc[ulate], Impress (presentation), and Draw. The commands and options change in these functions based on the users expertise which can be set among three levels. The software is even designed to help students learn how to read and write in cursive, but if a student has trouble with this or has a learning disability, the fonts can be changed to a sans serif type font. This project seems slightly less open to new volunteers working in the development than SugarLabs and OLPC. Instead, they require quite a bit more experience than what all of our team members have including a mastery or close to of C++ and some things I’ve never even heard of to contribute any kind of code. On the other hand, they welcome any kind of contribution to keep up their wiki and testing of developing products. Also, they allow for beginners to contribute to the creation of templates. ||