12 ms·

Sugar: An activity-focused, open-source software learning platform for children

182 points by bane 3y ago

StimDeck 3y ago
Neat, the gears were pretty entertaining, but whose kids will sit and use this? I think it’s incredible that people are volunteering their time to create open source learning software. I hope it’s extensible enough to incorporate paid content. IMHO anything less can compete for attention in today’s attention economy.
- pooper 3y ago
  > I hope it’s extensible enough to incorporate paid content. IMHO anything less can compete for attention in today’s attention economy. I don't want any paid content in my learning experience. We should encourage free as in beer and free as in freedom learning materials.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    As a former child who had his mind blown by the utter magic that my parents' Windows 3.11 and then Windows 95 machines had, no: I want real software I can play and learn the ins-and-outs with. I want games that are made with care for the children who play them (Oregon Trail, Math Blasters, JumpStart series, etc.) Whether it's paid or libre is irrelevant, kids literally don't care about Adult(tm) concepts like that.
  - LawrenceKerr 3y ago
    Ideally these things should be subsidized or at least run on generous donations, yes. But quality matters most to me. I'd happily pay for educational software that is proven to be better (more engaging, more fun, better learning outcomes) than free & open-source alternatives.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Yeah not mine. The screenshot for "This is one of the many fun activities" is a black and white blocky maze! I'm sure they mean well, but whoever made this doesn't have children.
  - wojciii 3y ago
    I tried to use this some time ago with my kids but they didn't find it interesting enough. I noticed that all the open source learning apps that I could find were kind of amateurish and buggy. I would pay good money for a tablet filled with software for kids that would teach the basics and be interesting at the same time. I found some games where I was able to remove adds (one time payment) and an app used for learning reading/writing.
  - alias_neo 3y ago
    I'm at the stage where I'm trying to get my kids into tech based "building", I'm a software engineer so want to start teaching them to write code asap, but don't want to start their computer journey there. I had a click through of this out of interest; by the time I'd picked a colour for my avatar (awful gaudy colour combinations), read the half-dozen tutorial tool-tips just to get the the main ring, I was already bored stiff, as an adult with an almost limitless concentration span. I hate to say it, but I can't imagine my children wanting to use this as it's presented, at any age.
  - rekado 3y ago
    My kid loves the maze activity. It actually is a lot of fun to her. While I will concede that many Sugar activities lean towards the ugly side (usually when images are involved), fun things don't need to be drenched in gaudy colors to be accessible to children.
senectus1 3y ago
this look suspiciously like the onelaptop for all stuff. remember those "wind up" laptops that they wanted to crowdsource for places that dont have electricity or internet.
- jayunit 3y ago
  Looks like! https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar
- rrix2 3y ago
  I've got two OLPC XO and one of the mainboards, they're such neat little machines. Never got one of the crank chargers though.
- Dwedit 3y ago
  It's exactly that. It's the software that was developed for the XO laptop.
- dosman33 3y ago
  IMHO, it was the correct pivot for them - from hardware to the OS. I remember the OLPC hardware was harshly criticized by industry, and even the audacity of the project was widely attacked. I considered it proof they were just ahead of the market here and industry realized it was behind the 8-ball. Meanwhile OLPC spawned a new form factor, netbooks and tablets did not exist until the OLPC project was first proposed in 2005. Netbooks wouldn't materialize until 2007, and the ipad launched in 2010. Once industry caught up though it was hard to compete against that, and at the end of the day OLPC was about the mission, not the hardware - but you can't have the mission without the hardware. So pivoting to Sugar was a smart move to achieve the mission once industry caught up. You can certainly make other arguments against some of the ideas of the project and what it was trying to achieve though. It definitely is a Western idea being applied to problems other civilizations may not have an interest in contending with. Water and food security, let alone electricity and communication infrastructure, are still real problems in the areas OLPC was targeted at.
  - Lazonedo 3y ago
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Developed as part of the One Laptop Per Child. Uses python, so the desktop is interpreted & open for modification (not compiled). Sugar was so incredibly far ahead of the curve. Figma & multiplayer computing? Sugar was doing this in ~2007. Local-first software, where a class-room without internet connectivity could share a canvas & collaborate together: https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/collaborating.html https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/collaborating.html The underpinnings were amazing. They used DBus for a lot of the activities to expose themselves programatically. To make things multiplayer, they used link-local XMPP to connect various DBus instances together. It was a brilliantly direct & straightforward & not-absurd way to take the FreeDesktop ideas & turn them into something connected & cross-system, without having to build a whole new stack. https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/book/sect.tubes.dbus.html https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/book/sect.tubes.dbus.h... It's really easy to see all the ways Sugar and OLPC didn't accomplish their mission & to see how it didn't work. But people just pass over all the incredible competently resourceful tech choices that were made here. And seemingly no one has had the ambition to unleash FreeDesktop technologies again (also RIP Maemo). Heck, no one's made a local-first laptop ever again!
- RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
  Sugar, and more generally the idea of using 2006-era Python to write an entire userland on a device with a pokey CPU and limited RAM, was a huge part of why OLPCs were unbearably slow to use. For all the hypothetical benefits it was a catastrophically poor decision that seriously undermined everything great about the hardware design of the XO-1.
  - ZiiS 3y ago
    Worth being clear, this doesn't detract from it now, where it is plenty fast on far cheaper hardware than the XO-1.
- oven9342 3y ago
  so since 2007 and 2023, we must have scientific assessment on the benefits of using computers instead of books?
Shorel 3y ago
It seems like a great product, with a terrible name.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  High Fructose Corn Syrup is already taken :D
- 0xEF 3y ago
  Out if curiosity, what's your take on the name? I'm okay with it, despite preferring names that help frame the product's purpose in my mind, but I can see the kid appeal in a name like Sugar Lab. Maybe I am missing some negative association, though.
  - Beijinger 3y ago
    Sugar Daddy?
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    Sugar just conjures up all sorts of negative connotations these days, especially if you are a parent. Like, as a parent, I see one of my major tasks in life as preparing my kid to enter a world where sugar (and lots of other forms of unhealthy but pleasurable things) are much more ubiquitous than the environment in which their basic intuitions about behavior evolved. One other area beyond literal physical sugar where this is true is technology, where a huge part of the ecosystem is actively predatory on children's time and attention. So the combination of "Sugar" as a name and something vaguely related to tech just gives bad vibes all around. I've tried Sugar out and I frankly find it somewhat condescending to children. Kid's don't need to be manipulated into using computers. They like them already and can readily appreciate that they are both fun and powerful. Rather than present to them a dumbed down interface we should be empowering them to use computers as they are, and conditioning them to expect that the computer itself be accessible to them, not hidden behind a fancy UI. When my kid was barely able to read I was showing him how to edit code and observe how it changes the behavior of characters in a game. He got it. We don't need goofy simplified user interfaces.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3y ago
[flagged]
- amurf 3y ago
  Brought to you by Diabetes Foundation.
sersi 3y ago
It's a neat project and great that it's opensource. I'm not an expert though but when I compare this to Educational apps from my childhood like Adibou or Castle of Dr Brain, it seems the activities are not as fun with the exception of Scratch (but that's external). I'm actually curious if there's research on how learning is impacting by the presentation of the material and how fun the activities are. Naively, I'd think those old educational software I've seen worked better because by being fun, they encouraged the child to try and solve puzzles, do activities longer. I have a child who is soon going to be 3 and I'd like to let him play some educational software 30 minutes a week or so so I'm actually actively interested in figuring what is something that's good, fun and has the most positive impact. So if anyone has some relevant studies etc... I'm all ears
- IanCal 3y ago
  I don't have studies but we found that "teach your monster to read" was great and enjoyed. It's UK focussed, about learning to read phonetics. It's essentially a series of mini-games tying a story together, and it was very engaging for my son at a similar age. Also it's a one off purchase. (Edit - on android, free online it seems) If that's not as relevant for you where you are, it might give some jumping off points for finding more like it https://www.teachyourmonster.org/teachyourmonstertoread https://www.teachyourmonster.org/teachyourmonstertoread
- rekado 3y ago
  > the activities are not as fun with the exception of Scratch (but that's external). Sugar has the TurtleArt activity, which is very much like Scratch but with the LOGO turtle: https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/turtleart.html https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/turtleart.html My 4+ year-old doesn't seem to mind the amount of fun in these activities; the rather boring-looking Maze activity is a current favorite. That said, I do think that many of the activities in the catalogue have a user interface that I find alienating or somewhat ugly.
  - sersi 3y ago
    I loved LOGO as a kid, my father was a teacher and he had a robotic LOGO turtle mounted with a pen that could be used to trace on A3 paper. Lot's of fun but that was more around 6 years old or so.
Animats 3y ago
Hung at new account creation. Got past that, stuck because it demands to use third-party cookies.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >stuck because it demands to use third-party cookies So like 99% of the mainstream web?
  - 8organicbits 3y ago
    I thought browsers now block 3rd party cookies, in some cases by default? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/goodbye-third-party-cookies/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/goodbye-third-party...
    - Animats 3y ago
      It's been a Firefox option to block them for a decade, and I've had them blocked for that long. Maybe 2%-3% of sites fail, and I've yet to find a site worth unblocking.
pests 3y ago
Then when they grow up they can upgrade to Crack by CrackLabs.
rekado 3y ago
You can install the Sugar desktop on Guix System, too. I have a little netbook with Guix System + Sugar that my kid uses.
walterbender 3y ago
There is a pretty decent overview of Sugar buried in this video about One Laptop per Child. We've continued to maintain the platform since 2006. It runs really well on on hardware. Many of the activities are available stand-alone in FlatPak. There is a browser version called Sugarizer. And there are some Sugar Labs activities for the web, such as Music Blocks. Regarding the comment that kids like computers (and will learn to use them without needing any special enticement), I couldn't agree more. Alan Kaye has been saying as much since the 1970s. But that said, while kids can learn to use computers, are they learning to use computers to learn? The latter is the goal of Sugar: to make the path of least resistance be one where kids engage with powerful ideas while constructing (not being instructed -- they already have plenty of that in their lives). So most of the activities are about building things. And the Sugar Journal is a vehicle for reflection on what they have built. Rather than condescending to kids, we empower them: Sugar is not just "open source". The kids are only one mouse-click away from seeing the source code of whatever activity they are engaged in. And Sugar provides affordances for the kids to then modify the code -- taking full ownership of their tools. Not every kid goes this deep into Sugar, but many do.
- walterbender 3y ago
  Forgot to include the link: https://youtu.be/zZ7qkZkp57c?si=1u0VQUQFAUsvMg7B https://youtu.be/zZ7qkZkp57c?si=1u0VQUQFAUsvMg7B
- Vinnl 3y ago
  Wow, so that's 18 years of maintenance and counting, congrats! Presumably, that means that there are also people who are adults now and got started with Sugar. Are you collecting testimonials by them anywhere? That would be fun to read.
akumetsu 3y ago
On my first day of my first job I was led around the office and introduced to my new colleagues, who were all sitting at their workstations. Then I was given my own and this was running on it. They all claimed this was the normal look and watched me try to figure out what was happening, lovely memories
- tazu 3y ago
  I tried the demo and it seems like this is built for exclusively for children, so was that some kind of hazing?
yadaeno 3y ago
Im in my late 20s and I find the “one laptop per child” thing to be insane. It seems like we abandoned hundreds of years of education tradition overnight to sell a few extra chromebooks with zero consideration of the downsides. Is anyone familiar with how much of the time learning is spent on the Chromebook? Is this normal in other countries?
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  1 - olpc / Sugar isn't a Chromebook at all, it's a learning OS meant for builders first, consumers second 2 - olpc was as much about making computing hardware cheaply and as accessible as possible to communities that didn't have any access to reliable electricity, let alone computers. Hence the built in hand crank 3 - to my knowledge, olpc distributed globally, but hardly addressed US or EU countries at all, so I'm not sure what you mean by "is this normal in other countries."
  - rincebrain 3y ago
    Nit - the crank was a prototype but it didn't ship on any models, because it turned out to not work well, and it turns out that places where people can't afford much technology, people also don't have that much spare energy to spend on hand cranking things.
    - IggleSniggle 3y ago
      Thanks for this...tbh I haven't actually followed the project since about 2008
    - em-bee 3y ago
      i thought the handcrank failed because the energy created was not enough, and turning a crank built into the laptop would create to much force that would break the laptop apart. i don't see that people who can't afford technology would have any less spare energy than people who do.
      - 3y ago
cwoolfe 3y ago
And it runs on Raspberry Pi! https://www.sugarlabs.org/sugar-for-raspberry-pi/ https://www.sugarlabs.org/sugar-for-raspberry-pi/

182 points by bane 3y ago

Neat, the gears were pretty entertaining, but whose kids will sit and use this? I think it’s incredible that people are volunteering their time to create open source learning software. I hope it’s extensible enough to incorporate paid content. IMHO anything less can compete for attention in today’s attention economy.

pooper 3y ago
> I hope it’s extensible enough to incorporate paid content. IMHO anything less can compete for attention in today’s attention economy. I don't want any paid content in my learning experience. We should encourage free as in beer and free as in freedom learning materials.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  As a former child who had his mind blown by the utter magic that my parents' Windows 3.11 and then Windows 95 machines had, no: I want real software I can play and learn the ins-and-outs with. I want games that are made with care for the children who play them (Oregon Trail, Math Blasters, JumpStart series, etc.) Whether it's paid or libre is irrelevant, kids literally don't care about Adult(tm) concepts like that.
- LawrenceKerr 3y ago
  Ideally these things should be subsidized or at least run on generous donations, yes. But quality matters most to me. I'd happily pay for educational software that is proven to be better (more engaging, more fun, better learning outcomes) than free & open-source alternatives.
IshKebab 3y ago
Yeah not mine. The screenshot for "This is one of the many fun activities" is a black and white blocky maze! I'm sure they mean well, but whoever made this doesn't have children.
- wojciii 3y ago
  I tried to use this some time ago with my kids but they didn't find it interesting enough. I noticed that all the open source learning apps that I could find were kind of amateurish and buggy. I would pay good money for a tablet filled with software for kids that would teach the basics and be interesting at the same time. I found some games where I was able to remove adds (one time payment) and an app used for learning reading/writing.
- alias_neo 3y ago
  I'm at the stage where I'm trying to get my kids into tech based "building", I'm a software engineer so want to start teaching them to write code asap, but don't want to start their computer journey there. I had a click through of this out of interest; by the time I'd picked a colour for my avatar (awful gaudy colour combinations), read the half-dozen tutorial tool-tips just to get the the main ring, I was already bored stiff, as an adult with an almost limitless concentration span. I hate to say it, but I can't imagine my children wanting to use this as it's presented, at any age.
- rekado 3y ago
  My kid loves the maze activity. It actually is a lot of fun to her. While I will concede that many Sugar activities lean towards the ugly side (usually when images are involved), fun things don't need to be drenched in gaudy colors to be accessible to children.

senectus1 3y ago

this look suspiciously like the onelaptop for all stuff. remember those "wind up" laptops that they wanted to crowdsource for places that dont have electricity or internet.

jayunit 3y ago
Looks like! https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar
rrix2 3y ago
I've got two OLPC XO and one of the mainboards, they're such neat little machines. Never got one of the crank chargers though.
Dwedit 3y ago
It's exactly that. It's the software that was developed for the XO laptop.
dosman33 3y ago
IMHO, it was the correct pivot for them - from hardware to the OS. I remember the OLPC hardware was harshly criticized by industry, and even the audacity of the project was widely attacked. I considered it proof they were just ahead of the market here and industry realized it was behind the 8-ball. Meanwhile OLPC spawned a new form factor, netbooks and tablets did not exist until the OLPC project was first proposed in 2005. Netbooks wouldn't materialize until 2007, and the ipad launched in 2010. Once industry caught up though it was hard to compete against that, and at the end of the day OLPC was about the mission, not the hardware - but you can't have the mission without the hardware. So pivoting to Sugar was a smart move to achieve the mission once industry caught up. You can certainly make other arguments against some of the ideas of the project and what it was trying to achieve though. It definitely is a Western idea being applied to problems other civilizations may not have an interest in contending with. Water and food security, let alone electricity and communication infrastructure, are still real problems in the areas OLPC was targeted at.
- Lazonedo 3y ago

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Developed as part of the One Laptop Per Child. Uses python, so the desktop is interpreted & open for modification (not compiled). Sugar was so incredibly far ahead of the curve. Figma & multiplayer computing? Sugar was doing this in ~2007. Local-first software, where a class-room without internet connectivity could share a canvas & collaborate together: https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/collaborating.html https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/collaborating.html The underpinnings were amazing. They used DBus for a lot of the activities to expose themselves programatically. To make things multiplayer, they used link-local XMPP to connect various DBus instances together. It was a brilliantly direct & straightforward & not-absurd way to take the FreeDesktop ideas & turn them into something connected & cross-system, without having to build a whole new stack. https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/book/sect.tubes.dbus.html https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/book/sect.tubes.dbus.h... It's really easy to see all the ways Sugar and OLPC didn't accomplish their mission & to see how it didn't work. But people just pass over all the incredible competently resourceful tech choices that were made here. And seemingly no one has had the ambition to unleash FreeDesktop technologies again (also RIP Maemo). Heck, no one's made a local-first laptop ever again!

RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
Sugar, and more generally the idea of using 2006-era Python to write an entire userland on a device with a pokey CPU and limited RAM, was a huge part of why OLPCs were unbearably slow to use. For all the hypothetical benefits it was a catastrophically poor decision that seriously undermined everything great about the hardware design of the XO-1.
- ZiiS 3y ago
  Worth being clear, this doesn't detract from it now, where it is plenty fast on far cheaper hardware than the XO-1.
oven9342 3y ago
so since 2007 and 2023, we must have scientific assessment on the benefits of using computers instead of books?

Shorel 3y ago

It seems like a great product, with a terrible name.

walthamstow 3y ago
High Fructose Corn Syrup is already taken :D
0xEF 3y ago
Out if curiosity, what's your take on the name? I'm okay with it, despite preferring names that help frame the product's purpose in my mind, but I can see the kid appeal in a name like Sugar Lab. Maybe I am missing some negative association, though.
- Beijinger 3y ago
  Sugar Daddy?
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  Sugar just conjures up all sorts of negative connotations these days, especially if you are a parent. Like, as a parent, I see one of my major tasks in life as preparing my kid to enter a world where sugar (and lots of other forms of unhealthy but pleasurable things) are much more ubiquitous than the environment in which their basic intuitions about behavior evolved. One other area beyond literal physical sugar where this is true is technology, where a huge part of the ecosystem is actively predatory on children's time and attention. So the combination of "Sugar" as a name and something vaguely related to tech just gives bad vibes all around. I've tried Sugar out and I frankly find it somewhat condescending to children. Kid's don't need to be manipulated into using computers. They like them already and can readily appreciate that they are both fun and powerful. Rather than present to them a dumbed down interface we should be empowering them to use computers as they are, and conditioning them to expect that the computer itself be accessible to them, not hidden behind a fancy UI. When my kid was barely able to read I was showing him how to edit code and observe how it changes the behavior of characters in a game. He got it. We don't need goofy simplified user interfaces.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3y ago

[flagged]

amurf 3y ago
Brought to you by Diabetes Foundation.

sersi 3y ago

It's a neat project and great that it's opensource. I'm not an expert though but when I compare this to Educational apps from my childhood like Adibou or Castle of Dr Brain, it seems the activities are not as fun with the exception of Scratch (but that's external). I'm actually curious if there's research on how learning is impacting by the presentation of the material and how fun the activities are. Naively, I'd think those old educational software I've seen worked better because by being fun, they encouraged the child to try and solve puzzles, do activities longer. I have a child who is soon going to be 3 and I'd like to let him play some educational software 30 minutes a week or so so I'm actually actively interested in figuring what is something that's good, fun and has the most positive impact. So if anyone has some relevant studies etc... I'm all ears

IanCal 3y ago
I don't have studies but we found that "teach your monster to read" was great and enjoyed. It's UK focussed, about learning to read phonetics. It's essentially a series of mini-games tying a story together, and it was very engaging for my son at a similar age. Also it's a one off purchase. (Edit - on android, free online it seems) If that's not as relevant for you where you are, it might give some jumping off points for finding more like it https://www.teachyourmonster.org/teachyourmonstertoread https://www.teachyourmonster.org/teachyourmonstertoread
rekado 3y ago
> the activities are not as fun with the exception of Scratch (but that's external). Sugar has the TurtleArt activity, which is very much like Scratch but with the LOGO turtle: https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/turtleart.html https://help.sugarlabs.org/en/turtleart.html My 4+ year-old doesn't seem to mind the amount of fun in these activities; the rather boring-looking Maze activity is a current favorite. That said, I do think that many of the activities in the catalogue have a user interface that I find alienating or somewhat ugly.
- sersi 3y ago
  I loved LOGO as a kid, my father was a teacher and he had a robotic LOGO turtle mounted with a pen that could be used to trace on A3 paper. Lot's of fun but that was more around 6 years old or so.

Animats 3y ago

Hung at new account creation. Got past that, stuck because it demands to use third-party cookies.

coldtea 3y ago
>stuck because it demands to use third-party cookies So like 99% of the mainstream web?
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  I thought browsers now block 3rd party cookies, in some cases by default? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/goodbye-third-party-cookies/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/goodbye-third-party...
  - Animats 3y ago
    It's been a Firefox option to block them for a decade, and I've had them blocked for that long. Maybe 2%-3% of sites fail, and I've yet to find a site worth unblocking.

pests 3y ago

Then when they grow up they can upgrade to Crack by CrackLabs.

rekado 3y ago

You can install the Sugar desktop on Guix System, too. I have a little netbook with Guix System + Sugar that my kid uses.

walterbender 3y ago

There is a pretty decent overview of Sugar buried in this video about One Laptop per Child. We've continued to maintain the platform since 2006. It runs really well on on hardware. Many of the activities are available stand-alone in FlatPak. There is a browser version called Sugarizer. And there are some Sugar Labs activities for the web, such as Music Blocks. Regarding the comment that kids like computers (and will learn to use them without needing any special enticement), I couldn't agree more. Alan Kaye has been saying as much since the 1970s. But that said, while kids can learn to use computers, are they learning to use computers to learn? The latter is the goal of Sugar: to make the path of least resistance be one where kids engage with powerful ideas while constructing (not being instructed -- they already have plenty of that in their lives). So most of the activities are about building things. And the Sugar Journal is a vehicle for reflection on what they have built. Rather than condescending to kids, we empower them: Sugar is not just "open source". The kids are only one mouse-click away from seeing the source code of whatever activity they are engaged in. And Sugar provides affordances for the kids to then modify the code -- taking full ownership of their tools. Not every kid goes this deep into Sugar, but many do.

walterbender 3y ago
Forgot to include the link: https://youtu.be/zZ7qkZkp57c?si=1u0VQUQFAUsvMg7B https://youtu.be/zZ7qkZkp57c?si=1u0VQUQFAUsvMg7B
Vinnl 3y ago
Wow, so that's 18 years of maintenance and counting, congrats! Presumably, that means that there are also people who are adults now and got started with Sugar. Are you collecting testimonials by them anywhere? That would be fun to read.

akumetsu 3y ago

On my first day of my first job I was led around the office and introduced to my new colleagues, who were all sitting at their workstations. Then I was given my own and this was running on it. They all claimed this was the normal look and watched me try to figure out what was happening, lovely memories

tazu 3y ago
I tried the demo and it seems like this is built for exclusively for children, so was that some kind of hazing?

yadaeno 3y ago

Im in my late 20s and I find the “one laptop per child” thing to be insane. It seems like we abandoned hundreds of years of education tradition overnight to sell a few extra chromebooks with zero consideration of the downsides. Is anyone familiar with how much of the time learning is spent on the Chromebook? Is this normal in other countries?

IggleSniggle 3y ago
1 - olpc / Sugar isn't a Chromebook at all, it's a learning OS meant for builders first, consumers second 2 - olpc was as much about making computing hardware cheaply and as accessible as possible to communities that didn't have any access to reliable electricity, let alone computers. Hence the built in hand crank 3 - to my knowledge, olpc distributed globally, but hardly addressed US or EU countries at all, so I'm not sure what you mean by "is this normal in other countries."
- rincebrain 3y ago
  Nit - the crank was a prototype but it didn't ship on any models, because it turned out to not work well, and it turns out that places where people can't afford much technology, people also don't have that much spare energy to spend on hand cranking things.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Thanks for this...tbh I haven't actually followed the project since about 2008
  - em-bee 3y ago
    i thought the handcrank failed because the energy created was not enough, and turning a crank built into the laptop would create to much force that would break the laptop apart. i don't see that people who can't afford technology would have any less spare energy than people who do.
    - 3y ago

cwoolfe 3y ago

And it runs on Raspberry Pi! https://www.sugarlabs.org/sugar-for-raspberry-pi/ https://www.sugarlabs.org/sugar-for-raspberry-pi/