At the last SugarCamp in May 2009 , Walter Bender had made us pleased to grant us an interview. He describes a few simple sentences what Sugar and SugarLabs. A nice interview to read to understand what drives this beautiful community and Sugar.
The first question, very simple: what Sugar?
What is Sugar? Sugar is a platform for learning. Sugar is a set of software that provide a rich environment for children to learn.
And has three features that make this platform different and I think special.
One of them is its simplicity. Sugar is easy to address. Thus, even the youngest children, even children of 2 and 3 can begin to use Sugar. At the same time, there is no limit to what they can do with Sugar. Thus, children can use this simple platform for achieving objectives very complex. They are therefore not limited by its simplicity but use simplicity to progress.
The second characteristic of Sugar is that it encourages collaboration. Sugar provides a very easy for children and teachers to work together on projects, share ideas and, in particular, to engage in a process of critical ideas. They can be expressive with their ideas, be expressive with their knowledge and engage in critical dialogue that is so important for learning.
The third part is thinking. Sugar keeps a record, a newspaper, everything you do and in this paper we store not only what you do but how you do it. So you can go back and see your progress, and use it as a means of personal evaluation. Teachers and parents can also view the log and use it as a way of knowing where the child is making progress, when the child is in trouble, and work with him.
The combination of simplicity, collaboration and reflection. That's what really Sugar.
What are the intellectual roots of Sugar? What are their fathers and grandfathers in terms of concepts?
As you probably know, the great grandfather of John Dewey is Sugar. Sugar based and reflects the tremendous work of people like Maria Montessori, Paulo Freire, Seymour Papert and Alan Kay. All these people who have thought about teaching and to the richness of the learning experience. So Sugar is not the teaching is learning. This is not to educate, it is to learn. Sugar and is anchored in forty to fifty years of research. It's not as if we woke up one morning and had decided, "Hey, let's create a program for children" is something we have lived and inspired us all our lives .
What is Sugar Labs and how do you work with teachers? Sugar Labs is it more next development or is it a mixture of all these ideas on education?
Well, Sugar Labs is a community. It is a community of people who want to give children the opportunity to learn and to achieve this goal, based on free tools. What we have done with the Sugar Labs is to create an international coalition of educators, developers, artists, writers, parents, and children, all who are interested in ways of learning and ways to teach others. So we brought groups around the world. There is also a very important group here in France: OLPC France. To Sugar Labs, there are teachers who talk about how they use Sugar and make comments to the developer community. There are developers who are not interested only in pleasure to develop, but also to contributing to the achievement of development tools for others, which I think is a good indication of what this community . It is a moral principle. One of our goals is to make the Sugar community as inclusive as possible. The Sugar community is truly a learning community. And any person who is a learner can become part of this community and contribute to the body of knowledge that the community has accumulated.
What distinguishes Sugar and Sugar Labs educational project and other educational projects based on ICT in the world?
There are several things that distinguish Sugar. There are many large ICT projects. For example, here in France, there is the project which GCompris Coudoin Bruno took the lead. A great job. And I hope it will be part of this broader platform of greater experience what Sugar. [Editor's note: this is the case.] Sugar is like a sponge, it can integrate the big ideas and make them available to more children, more people.
But Sugar has a particular way to achieve this. We try to give Sugar "affordances" that make certain types of behavior that we consider important for learning to occur. I'll make an analogy. Suppose I want to give a book to a child. I can give him the book in PDF format which is really a read-only or I can give the book as a Wiki. The difference is not in the reading, the difference is in the hope, aspiration, the child will not only read but also write. It will not only absorb but also engage in a dialogue. The Wiki format contains affordances that will allow this activity, while a PDF does not allow it.
What we're trying to do with Sugar is to take excellent teaching ideas worldwide that incorporate these affordances and encouraging collaboration, this reflection and growth.
Why Free Software? Y is there any limitations attached to free software, or simply a greater potential? Can you explain the idea of "crumple zone" which you speak?
Sugar must be free software. We have not really the right word in English to express freedom. Sugar Sugar should be free because the learning. And, fundamentally, learning is not receiving appropriate ideas, but ideas. This is to implement an idea. You can not do it if it is not free software. There is another aspect which is important for learning is the cultural aspect of free software. Free software is not just about sharing, free software is also a critical issue. It is entering a critical dialogue about the ideas. And it is fundamental to learning. So, without the free software culture, learning can not be as rich. Sugar should be free software.
Now I would like to make an analogy to the automotive industry. The auto industry used to make cars that were very rigid. Thus, when this car crashed into a rigid tree, nothing happened to the car. But all the energy of impact was so absorbed by the passengers of the car. The car was protected but not passengers. The automotive industry has realized that it was a mistake: people are more important than cars. So they developed the concept of "crumple zone" which, instead of making the car hard, the car makes it flexible, so that the energy is absorbed in the car. The car can be broken, not people.
We try to implement the same analogy and I think Sugar is also inherent to free software. This is the idea of a deformation zone where we do not see a software locked and rigid. For it is an impossible goal: there will always be problems. But instead of imposing the problems to the user, to the child, the learner, we transform this into a learning opportunity. Learning involves making mistakes. And when you make a mistake and you try to debug a problem, this means first that you are passionate about something and we want to take this passion. But there is also the fact that if the price of a mistake is high, you will quickly learn not to take any risks. You soon learn not to challenge ideas. We therefore ensure that the price of Sugar errors is very low. We make sure that it is not difficult to break. We make it easy to break, but we pay the price of a very small error. So we encourage children to explore, experiment, try things. And I think again this is related to the culture of free software. The automotive industry is not always to imitate but there are still good ideas to take back.
Sugar was originally developed for the XO OLPC, now it is available on more platforms. Does that mean that Sugar has been developed to developing countries and is now available for any country?
Well, Sugar has been developed for children's learning. Indeed, the platform for which we have developed the computer XO Sugar is the OLPC project. The XO computer targeting children in the developing world. So naturally most of their concerns have influenced the design of Sugar. But Sugar has always been basically designed for the learning of all. And you're from the East, West, North and South, each of us is a teacher and a student. For everyone, a part of our DNA as human beings that we are being that S'Express and be social.
Now Sugar is built on these foundations and these foundations are universal. So one of the things we did and why we created the Sugar Labs is that we wanted to take these ideas and allow them to go beyond the XO of the OLPC. The OLPC XO is a great platform but it's a platform. There are many other interesting platforms that we would be able to achieve well. There is for example the Gdium, or more generally the whole netbook phenomenon.
More importantly, there is a relatively new effort for Sugar, Sugar it comes on a USB key, USB live. With "Sugar on a Stick", you can experiment with Sugar on any computer. So we can take a collection of old computers in a school and allow children to run Sugar. These children can then take Sugar, the take home, use it on the computer of their parents, in a library or Internet cafe. So, suddenly, Sugar is everywhere of course, the more people who use Sugar, the community is more important and more rich experience for all.
What are the next steps, what are the upcoming deadlines for Sugar Labs and projects of Sugar?
Sugar Labs itself is a virtual community. There is not a physical place to Sugar Labs. We live on IRC irc.freenode.net, channel # sugar. This is where we live, but what we're trying to do with Sugar Labs is a consensus in the international community around our goals. Both of our development goals are to build a place to exchange ideas, where teachers can exchange ideas with other teachers on pedagogy, on how they use Sugar in the classroom, where developers can share their creations with others. There are many tasks ahead, but the real effort, the real work of Sugar Labs, is to grow the community and the discussions in the community.
Thanks
Thank you
Interview: Laurence Bastien Guerry and Buchmann.
Transcript and translation: Lionel Laski and David Schönstein.
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