Dec 18, 2009
Sugar on a Stick
It’s that time of year when we light the Yule log and gather around the Tannenbaum, spin the dreidel and celebrate the Winter Solstice with eggnog and Christmas treats (I hope I covered every holiday, if not please forgive me). While your snacking on cookies and livivot, why not try a little Sugar on a Stick?
Sticky Goodness
Sugar on a Stick is provided by Sugar Labs. The goal of Sugar on a Stick is to provide children with a portable linux distribution that use the Sugar desktop environment. This is made possible using the Fedora LiveUSB Creator. Just a grab usb stick that’s 1GB or more and you’ll be ready to go in about 10 minutes.
My Impressions of Sugar
I have know idea where to begin when describing Sugar. If you never seen Sugar, its a desktop environment that spang out of the One Laptop per Child project that uses mainly icons. It is definitely out of the box thinking, with the basic idea that even a child that cannot read should be able to navigate around the desktop. With that being said I found it quite hard at first to figure out what I was doing, but once I figured out the icons Sugar was actually easy to use. Sugar comes with a lot of education software already installed and ready to use. The types of software include math, reading, typing, and programing applications. These range in age form preschool to high school. One of my favorites was a drawing program that allowed the shapes drawn to interact with each other using real time physics. From my understanding Sugar really shines when more than one computer in connected together in a ad-hoc network. When connected the applications allow for collaboration between the students and the teacher. I didn’t have a second computer to try this out on, but I have seen a demonstration with the One Laptop per Child laptops. Overall I would say that I had fun playing with Sugar on a Stick and can see a real benefit in it. I’ll have to get my four year old to try it to see what he thinks. In conclusion if you have young ones around and are looking for an educational computing environment give Sugar on a Stick a try. It’s a convenient way to have a portable and child friendly computing environment without the need to dedicate an entire computer for such a purpose.
