Posts that are soas-ish

Aaaand… they’re off and blogging!


Colin Zwiebel has a nice description of the blog paper that Lynne May is using with her students. From the comments:

“…as people are introduced to tech tools, they have to deal with the issue of option overload. I think its a good exercise to learn that often you only care about a few key options.”

I’m hoping that the “blog paper” templates (and the “trac ticket” templates, too!) will be posted up under a CC-BY-SA license sometime soon – I’m pretty sure that’s the intent. They’re very simple. In the meantime, the students have begun to post, and have also started to get comments on their blogs – which is very exciting for them. I need to learn how to set up a Planet-like feed aggregator for the class (suggestions welcome – I’d like something a bit more recent that isn’t abandonware, as Planet itself hasn’t been touched for several years).

Without further ado, here are the kids, under their “Sugar Names.” If you read the comments, you’ll notice their parents are also getting into the act. ;-)

They’re still getting used to blogging and haven’t gotten to the point of submitting their first bug reports yet, but I’m told that a few have since been discovered, so perhaps tomorrow (the next “upstream day” – where the class circles around to think about what they have done with SoaS over the past week and figures out what and how they want to report back upstream) we will hear more.


Fixing the Record Activity / re-firing up QA


The Record Activity wasn’t working in our (testing) image of SoaS. Fortunately, Sebastian was in town and quickly showed Melanie how to fix it – it’s just a matter of updating to the latest RPM.

  1. Switch to root.
  2. Run “yum update –enablerepo=rawhide sugar-record” (no quotes)

That’s it.

On a separate note, now that Melanie has picked up on deployment support (I have very little to do with that at this point other than being around for general minionhood – Melanie’s my boss for that) I’m starting to (finally) turn my thoughts to testing/QA infrastructure. The Welly crew has been keeping the flame alive and I’ve got quite a bit to learn from them from the year I’ve been out of the OLPC/Sugar QA loop.


Meeting the students


This afternoon, Sebastian, Greg, and I called in remotely to Lynne May’s class, where they’re just starting their SoaS deployment. It was a short call – or rather, a short series of calls, because Lynne May first called Sebastian in Germany (with Greg and myself on IRC backchannel with him), then called me and Greg in Westford (with Sebastian on IRC backchannel), and everything – including technical glitches – took less than half an hour.

It was enough. On IRC, in the #sugar channel, debriefing afterwards…

Sebastian: They asked a lot of questions, like how I achieved this… having it on a stick, and why Sugar Labs was called Sugar Labs. They had bracelets or so attached to their usb keys to recognize them… and they sat down in a circle and showed them to me.
Mel: We saw the bracelets, but they were very much not in a circle at that point. We had a lot of kids running in front of the camera, coming up to the camera…
Sebastian: heh, ayup… constant movement ;-)
Mel: They asked us where we were and what time it was, and we said we were in Boston, in the office, at work, showed them the parking lot out the window, walked them through the hallways, they got to wave to Max. Spot was out, but we showed them his collection of penguins, frogs, and Star Wars action figures. (imitating excited kid:)”I LOVE Star wars action figures!”
Sebastian: LOL! :)
Mel: Loud enough for everyone in the office to hear through the headphones. And everyone within earshot started cracking up.
Sebastian: Yeah, so I showed them that it was late out here… Lynne May said I was going to bed “soon.” I replied that it depended on the definition of “soon”. ;-) We agreed to pretend it was soon.
Mel: “within the next 4 hours” == “soon”
Sebastian grins. yup!
Sebastian: I feel this is another kind of situation that reminds of… “why are we doing this?” As in, “ayup, THIS is why we’re doing it”
Mel: Oh, I wish I’d thought to take pictures of Greg talking with the kids from our side.
Sebastian: Mhm. Might have not been the last call. ;-)

We used Skype – I wish there were an open source option, but as things stand now, this is the best we were able to do. (And we still had connectivity issues.)

What we’re trying to do here is give the kids the idea that people they talk to online – people in the open source community they’re joining – are real people, people who may be far away in other places doing other things, but who also come online to work with them on Sugar. (This is a difficult abstract concept to grasp when you’re a first-grader. For that matter, it’s hard for grown-ups to grasp sometimes; I still have to explain how I work every day with people I’ve never met in person, and how yes, I really do know them, I don’t need to sit next to them all the time, etc.)

So we popped online – where they’ll usually see us – today. We’ll be dropping by the classroom in person briefly on Friday morning to go “look, we are real people!” And then I believe there will be regular short chat sessions on Friday mornings. (Yeah, more Skype. Better alternatives welcome.)

It’s hard to capture in words now; typing this seems so faded and gray compared to the rush of a posse of running, waving kids shouting into the screen, waving their USB sticks around, chorusing in overlapping voices (that I needed help understanding – thanks, Lynne May). It’s the kind of experience that… it makes me want to keep on doing this. I want to share it with as many people as possible.

I’d like to see whether we can get every single person who directly contributes to this deployment to meet the kids. Gary and Tomeu responded to a post from Lynne May about debugging Write – I wonder if they could help the students walk through testing it a little bit in a 10-minute video conversation. Luke is working with David and Bernie on migrating some Sugar Labs infrastructure into the capable hands of a group of RIT students; these are all services the kids will be learning and seeing and using, and being able to meet the people “behind the curtain,” so to speak, is pretty magical. 10-15 minutes is not long enough to really finish anything, to be sure -  but enough to keep them going and excited, enough to keep us going and excited, enough to remind us why we do all this in the first place.


CFS SoaS update: “All he knows is that he’s got to be excited about Sugar on a Stick.”


Melanie did a short update-video shoot with Lynne May on Tuesday night – it was done very late at night, and I love how Lynne May goes from exhausted to animated as she talks about the deployment. (The video becomes most interesting to me about 2 minutes in.) I livetranscribed – full transcript, as best as I can render it, posted below.

Transcript: Lynne May, 1st grade teacher

I’m testing – I’m going through the Sugar Activities to see what would be interesting for the kids.

I’m thinking how to introduce to unit to the children… talking about how communities – the general idea the kids have is that in communities, people get together, they work together, they agree on things, they have peace and love and they show respect.

We’re going to focus first on neighborhoods, the communities where they live. They actually have the homework of thinking about what they see in their neighborhood, so they have to figure out where they live, what neighborhoods they belong to, and what is their street where they live. I asked them to do some visualization of their neighborhood and they got to tell about what they saw on their way to school this morning from their house.

What? (Mel, from the side: You were talking at dinner about how they were really excited…) So I saw this neighborhood, and I said that we would study two other neighborhoods, I said our school community, which is the community where you work, so they’re ok with that, and then I said the third is an open source community called Sugar Labs. And I wrote “Sugar Labs,” and they said “Sugar? Labs?” And I forgot what one kid said, but I said “oh, lab, it’s like a laboratory.”

And I gave a very generic description of open source community – it’s where people who take time from their lives to develop software, applications, for other people to use for free, and then I referenced the DS and the games they have that they have to buy and pay money for. And I said the open source community people believe that there should be some things that should be available to anybody in this world for free. I think it’s like “huh?”

And that’s when I said “remember when my niece Mel, and…” and then they said “SEBASTIAN!” And then I said “Uh huh.” And (as kids:) “Oh! Oh!” And then they got really excited. (As teacher:) “We will not start right away!”

But then they… because I told their parents [about the SoaS pilot] in their [weekly classroom] newsletter and apparently some parents told their kids, so one kid, yesterday, Monday, when we got back from break, said “Are we going to work on the computer?” I said “Yes, aaand…” And then today he said “My mom said we’re gonna work on Sugar.” And then he said “My dad said we’re gonna have Sugar on a Stick.” So I said “What does that mean, Sugar on a Stick?” (As kid:) “Sugar on a Stick!” (As teacher, joking:) “You mean to say… something sweet, on a stick?” All he knows is that he’s got to be excited about Sugar on a Stick. He was quite excited about it.

But I think they are excited about it. So… So we’ll see. They might start saying “Oh, Lynne May, you said we’re going to have Sugar on a Stick! Where is it? Where is it?” By… tomorrow, they might say that. I’ll ask them to be patient.

(Melanie, behind the camera: So you’re actually going to start introducing it next week?) I will see if I can start introducing it on Friday. Or… yeah, maybe on Friday, or if not earlier, Thursday, to begin to. But it will be great to be introduce it when they have the computer, right? And I don’t think we are that ready yet to have the computers in the classroom. I mean me and the kids. Because first week back from break, I have to get them back on the routine. After being away for a week. You know, they sort of get excited like it’s the first week of school.

Anyway. So some of the things I’ve been thinking about is a [paper] journal that they would have a… when they will upload blog entries for, when they’re thinking about bug reports, that they would write there. (Melanie, from behind the camera: Battery runs out in 1 minute 30 seconds.) That’s ok, I won’t go on too long. So I’m working on tweaking on what it should look like. I have a prototype, I will see if that works.

That’s it for now. I’m pretty sleepy. (Melanie, holding the camera: That’s ok, thank you.) Bye.


Does the stick matter?


(Replies to yesterday’s post on the datastore forthcoming, btw – thank you to all who responded! I’m swamped with email on the road and waiting for a stretch during which I can compose actual thoughtful replies.)

We got cheap 4GB ones from the local computer store, all identical – we’re going to have the kids make keychains to attach to them so the sticks will be (1) personalized, (2) identifiable, and (3) bigger and therefore harder to lose.

For the “stick” part of Sugar on a Stick: are there some sticks that are better than others? Flash memory wears out over time – do some brands or types of sticks wear out faster than others, or is the cheap bulk brand from Microcenter equal to the fancy ones 1.5x the cost? How long, on average – and you’ll have to define “average use” – should a deployment expect a SoaS stick to last?

My suspicion is that (1) it really doesn’t matter, and (2) long enough – the only extra thing expensive sticks might get you is slightly better-looking sticks and improvements in mechanical construction (cap, cover, etc). But I do not know the manufacturing factors that affect flash life, nor whether different companies are likely to have different setups, tolerances, quality control, or so forth. (Come to think of it, this might be a cool “How Stuff Is Made” video if there isn’t one already.) I also guess that the mean time to failure will be greater than the mean time to kid-losing-stick. (It happens. This is why backups are important.) But those are only unsubstantiated guesses.

A good lazy Sunday project, or even a “I have to write a paper for my science class” paper, if you’re a student, would be to get a
number of sacrificial thumbdrives (multiple of each type, all brand-new) and do http://www.bress.net/blog/archives/114-How-Long-Does-a-Flash-Drive-Last.html on each.


Because this blog isn’t on Planet yet…


…I wanted to make sure that folks got a chance to see Lynne May’s posts about the upcoming SoaS deployment – she’s the classroom teacher. (Bernie’s working on getting the blog on Planet, so this should be a moot point soon. Thanks, Bernie!)

“I think it is important for my students to know that Sugar is based on these principles. I want them to think whether or not  these principles are compatible with their own thinking about themselves as learners, and about learning.  I see how these principles connect to the Quaker principles of our school. Will they?” — from Reflections on the Sugar Mission Statement

Cambridge Friends School is a Quaker school, so it’s interesting to me to see her translating our Sugar work into the values that the school already holds dear, because that’s what they’re going to think is important, that’s how they’re going to be able to start understanding this. It’s like everything else in open source; you start with what they already care about, the itches they want to scratch, and then you find the intersections of your self-interest and theirs where it makes sense for both of you to work together.

There’s also the Proposal draft, which includes the following:

The social studies curriculum for grade one room 2 will focus on
communities for the rest of the school year beginning February. The
students will explore three parallel communities: the school community
(where they work), the neighborhood (where they live), and the Sugar
Labs community (where they share ideas). In the course of this unit,
the students will attempt to answer these two questions:

  1. What role do I play in these communities, and how do I fulfill this role?
  2. What makes a community work well for me, and how could I tell if it would work well for someone else?

This has a few important framings and implications. One thing the open source world has historically had a hard time with is communicating to others how we work – how our communities work – because at first glance it sounds totally unlike anything someone from outside the open source world is used to. However, if you frame it as:

  1. Your school is where you work
  2. Your neighborhood at home is where you live
  3. Your open source community is where you share ideas

…then bam, the parallels make a lot more sense. I’ll also note that #3 is basically the core of the definition of a community of practice.

The other exciting implication is that the work of the students is going to be learning how to explain open source participation to others. This is great, because…

  1. It means they will be participating.
  2. It means we will have first-graders able to explain how to participate – and if they can grok this and explain it, then by gosh anyone can.

I think that there may be a part of some people’s brains that turns off when I open my mouth[0] – “Oh, you’re one of those… math and… technology people… engineer… I have no hope of understanding what you’re saying so I will now switch to Nod Politely Mode.” But this same circuit does not trigger when faced with a first-grader saying basically the same thing. Because a 6 or 7 year old can’t possibly be saying things that should go that far over your head – if they understand it, you should be able to understand it too.

One thing I would love to see: if we made it a practice to have every Sugar Labs presence at an event include at least 2 presenters age 12 or under. And I mean presenters – speakers, boothworkers, etc – not “we happen to be hanging around the booth while our parents work it.” The kids should be running the show, with the grown-ups supporting them as loyal minions. Mmm, minions. I’m looking forward to trying this out… just need to find a nearby event so the kids (and their parents) can actually make it over there.

[0] Although I also think I tend to trigger this less than some of my fellow engineers – as a young minority woman, I look less like an engineer, which sometimes helps with getting folks to be more open-minded about the things I’m trying to say. (Hey, while the situation exists, we might as well use it to our advantage.)


Netbooks have arrived!


This is the latest episode in the CFS SoaS Deployment Saga.

Netbooks arrived today! We filmed the unboxing.

I annotated the video so it’s easier follow along with my excited-and-way-too-fast narration. Annotations converted into bulleted transcript form below:

  • We are unboxing netbooks for the 1st grade SoaS pilot at the Cambridge Friends School.
  • We got Acer Aspire One 532h netbooks because they’re (1) cheap and (2) known to work well with Fedora (the underlying OS for SoaS).
  • I am talking really fast because I’m happy (and nervous about being on camera).
  • We’re doing this at the kitchen table in the middle of a normal day – it’s a snow day for school, a lunch break for me.
  • Melanie is way better at opening boxes than I am.
  • We’re keeping the boxes the netbooks arrived in to be used as cases for transport.
  • We may someday need to buy accessories like extra batteries or cases. We’re not worrying about that now, though.
  • The netbooks cost $298.95 each; we got 3, for a total of about $900 out of our $1000 hardware budget.
  • There are 3 netbooks and 9 students, so 1 netbook for every 3 students.
  • The netbooks come in 3 different colors so they’re easy to tell apart; students will be assigned to a netbook to keep them from fighting over their favorite colors.
  • I apparently cannot identify colors. We eventually figured out that the netbooks were silver, blue, and red.
  • We would like to plaster these netbooks with Sugar Labs stickers. (And Fedora ones, for that matter.) If you have 3 extra Fedora or Sugar stickers floating around that can easily reach the Boston area, let me know.
  • Concerns: is the hardware usable? (Can they use trackpads? Should we buy mice?)
  • Concerns: will the hardware survive a classroom of 6-7 year olds? (The students need to write a usage agreement and sign it with their parents, promising that they will take good care of the netbooks.)
  • The 6th graders last year (7th graders now) used XOs, and the 4th graders are using them this year, so the 1st graders will ask the older students for advice on how they did their usage agreement.
  • The 4th grade and 1st grade are buddy classes, so the connection between the two grades using Sugar this year will be especially strong.
  • The 1st graders will be working on their usage agreements during the first week of the deployment, and blogging about them on Planet Sugar Labs.


People in the video:

Lynne May (black vest) – voice, camera: my aunt and the 1st grade classroom teacher involved.

Melanie (red vest) my cousin, a high school freshman off school for a snow day today, and another deployment support team member (brand-new, as of an hour ago).

Mel (blue shirt) – me: deployment support.

This concludes my deployment duties for the day. Melanie will be installing Fedora 12 (one each of GNOME, KDE, and XFCE) on the netbooks later this afternoon. Strictly speaking, this isn’t necessary for the deployment, since the sticks (liveusbs) will bypass whatever is on the hard drive, but if, for instance, a stick isn’t working and they need to boot a computer to go online and figure out what’s happening, they won’t have to boot into Windows 7 (which came on the netbooks) to do so.


“It’s like the wii!”


Some things I’ve learned in the past few days while living with a teacher about to deploy SoaS:

Sugar is like the Wii.
Lynne May had asked what Sugar was, in the “is it a program? is it a browser? is it the same sort of thing as Windows?” context, and I was scrawling on the whiteboard trying to explain the concept of a software stack without much success. Suddenly, she cried out: “It’s a platform! It’s like the Wii!”

Which actually made sense, after I thought about it a little. A modern console lets you manage settings and data (even an avatar) that apply across all your games; you have a selection of games made to run on that platform (but which may also run on other platforms as well). You can get new games and swap them with your friends, who may have a different selection than you do according to their interests. It’s an analogy I never would have thought of myself.

Teachers are massively parallel. They have a zillion things to proxy all at once, with crazy schedule constraints, a large number of diverse constituents, frequent interruptions… a far cry from the extended periods of focus that developers (occasionally) enjoy. At any given time, two kids might start an argument while a third has trouble reading and a fourth is bored while a fifth’s parent calls and the principal stops by – and that’s light. You need to think about the privacy concerns the parents are going to have. You have to think ahead to how you’re going to describe to your principal how you’re going to describe to the parents of your students how you’re going to describe the deployment to your students before you can think about releasing a description of the deployment to anyone else, which means even initial proposal drafts take a while to be posted.

And somewhere in all this, you’re supposed to find uninterrupted time to immerse yourself in a new culture with different communication norms and tools and learn an unfamiliar platform while being met with baffling amounts of silence and criticism (news flash: returning silence upon success and error messages upon failure doesn’t work for people, they need confirmation of success and possibly some praise when relevant).

I shouldn’t have a hard time understanding this – I’ve taught before, run classrooms before, been responsible for the curricular experience of groups of kids before… and yet it is hard for me, sometimes. The hacker portion of my brain wants to shoot first, ask questions later, assumes I’ll get a second shot if I mess up. Not so – if I mess up, I can roll back the wiki page; if a teacher messes up, that’s someone’s future that’s been changed.

And so even the simple step of creating a blog and sending its feed URL to the planetmaster, even under the fortuitous circumstance of already knowing how to blog and how to get around a particular software platform (Wordpress, in this case) – even that becomes a 2-day exercise in “before I set this up, we need to think about how the kids will post, and how we will inform the parents, and what happens with comment moderation, and when in the weekly schedule do we fit this in, and…” there are a lot of dependencies, and it’s hard to unthread.

Open source communities are pretty awe-inspiring. This is something that I love to rediscover through the eyes of each new person that encounters open source – for me, getting random emails and comments on a project I’m working on from folks I may have never met before is par for the course, but to someone who’s not used to it, it’s more like: “Whoa, three people emailed in response to your post? Who are they? Why… why are they being so nice? Wow! How do I even respond to this? Um. Thank you! Thank you!”

This post is very much written through the lens of a young engineering-oriented mind. I am sure I’ve gotten much of this wrong, and look forward to subsequent corrections. ;-)


SoaS deployment hardware: the ideal set


One of my two jobs for the week for Lynne May’s SoaS deployment is getting hardware for all this to run on.

The first (and largest) purchases we’ll have to make are the netbooks. Peter Robinson, our resident Fedora netbook guru, looked earlier for something that fit our specs and price range ($1000 USD for 3 netbooks) while being sturdily-built (mechanical design is important; we’ve got first-graders here) with a good battery life. One requirement was known compatibility with recent versions of Fedora, since SoaS is Fedora-based (the next release will be a Fedora Spin) and we’re trying to stack the deck in favor of the software and hardware working together as smoothly as possible. Based on these criteria, Peter recommended the Acer Aspire One 532h, which is about $300.

(photo cc-by from ndevil)

Lynne May also wanted a little video/still camera to capture the students playing with Sugar – they’re still learning to read and write, so having an easy way to record verbal presentations (and demos/screencasts, for that matter) in the classroom means we’ll get that much more documented output. (We will, however, need to get permission from the parents of individual kids to share the video material.) But right now we just need to get the hardware – so I pointed her towards the Kodak zi8 which can be had refurbished for about $150 USD and has gotten a big thumbs-up from Mo Duffy. Seriously, I borrowed it at the office two months after she got it and she was still raving about it, so it’s got to be good stuff. Waiting for the +1 on funding for that.

(One of the things I’ve learned while writing this post: finding CC-licensed photos of hardware is hard. I couldn’t find one for the zi8.)

And of course we need the sticks themselves. We need 14 sticks (9 students, 1 teacher, 4 testing/backup) and need them to have caps that aren’t removable, because that’s just asking for lost caps in a classroom full of 6-7 year olds. Other than that, we don’t really care what we get, so this should be easy to source once we get the (very small) amount of funding needed for them. (Yes, when you’re working with a classroom, $100 can be a blocker.)

(Original images cc-by from molotalksuperdry, red bull/honda, ship, and banana. Also, this picture should make it painfully obvious why I need friends like Nikki to fix my wince-inducing color schemes.)

I’m going to be placing orders early on Monday morning, so any last-minute feedback (including running screaming in our direction going “noooooooooo this is a bad ideaaaaaaa!” if applicable) would be muchly appreciated.


Lynne May’s SoaS deployment


From the department of what-Mel-does-in-her-free-time: We’re doing a Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) deployment in my aunt Lynne May’s 9-student first-grade class, and just got the green light from the school to proceed – so I’m going to jump straight into documenting what we’re doing, and then (in later posts) fill in the background and continue to get us in shape for being good open source citizens with things like project wiki pages not in my userspace and better meeting notes and whatnot.

This means it might be confusing for a while (because we’ll be writing about things for which the background context may initially be missing) but if you’re curious, please ask questions – they’ll give me things to write more about in future posts, too! (And yes, the other people involved with the deployment should be hitting Planet Sugar Labs with their posts shortly as well.)

The curricular theme for the second half of first grade at this school has traditionally been “community” – so Lynne May is planning her curriculum so the kids spend the whole semester learning (in a very exploratory way) about the Sugar Labs community and coming up with ways to convey their understanding of how open source participation works. For comparison, they’ll be looking at open source communities in parallel with two other kids of communities: their school (all together) and the neighborhood they (individually) live in.

And they’ll be participating upstream – this was important to Lynne May, that we find a way for the students to become a part of an open source community. We’re watching for opportunities throughout term for them to submit bug reports, blog on Planet Sugar Labs, participate in online meetings (in IRC, with a computer hooked to a wall projector and a grown-up typing and helping them read), and generally listening for things the Sugar (and Sugar-in-Fedora) community needs that they can make, and making them.

I am excited.

The game plan for the week is something like this – note that we’re deliberately trying to keep things simple and the workload low so that we’re all only spending a few extra hours a week on this deployment (the work should be minimal, and the vast majority of that work should be stuff we would have to do anyway).

  • In user-land: Lynne May is continuing to work with school administration on getting (and keeping!) our all-clear-to-proceed status, and starting to think about how to inform parents. She’s also spending more time getting to know various Activities, as shehas played with Sugar multiple times before, but never in the “how will I use this in my classroom right now?” sense. Last night’s adventure was Etoys, which was ultimately deemed too difficult to work with first-graders on within the scope of our deployment. We would love to be proven wrong about this, by the way – the concern is mostly that we’d spend so much time getting through the basics of Etoys that this is all we’d be able to do for the last 4 months of the school year.
  • In support-and-testing land: I am purchasing hardware  and putting up our remaining bit of infrastructure: a test case system. Sugar Labs Infrastructure wizard (and head honcho) Bernie Innocenti has given me the access mojo needed to get Semantic Mediawiki on a test box – which is really all we need for a 4-month experiment. It’s not like the absence of a test case system will block the ability of the class to work with SoaS, but if we can get a good test case system going, the things we learn could also help other projects, so it’s something I’m going to be trying.
  • In development land: Sebastian is getting the rawhide composes working for the SoaS build we’ll be using – we’re going to be testers for the F13-based spin, with Blueberry (the current stable version) as our fallback in case anything explodes. This in itself is a big task, which means that we could use some help with packaging Activities.

Our next check-in meeting is Thursday. We still need to figure out a regular check-in on curricular matters (so far, Lynne May and I have just been talking casually every evening – I live with her family, so this is easy… and we need to start documenting these conversations) – but we touch base on technical matters at the weekly Fedora Sugar meetings in #fedora-olpc on Thursdays at 1500 UTC (10am EST).

Anyone is welcome to join in; the meetings are for any Sugar work being done in Fedora. All the agenda items have so far been somehow related to this deployment, but if you’ve got your own SoaS deployment, are working on Activity packaging, are interested in getting Sugar packages in EPEL to work towards Sugar being available on RHEL in the future, that all fits – join us!