Writing new Activities and sharing Sugar with Youth

Editorial note: This article was given to us by Sugar Labs community member James Simmons as part of a series called Sugar Stories, which aims to highlight stories from members our community. If you would like to share your Sugar Story with us as an article for possible publication, please send a draft to info@sugarlabs.org. Please be aware that there is an editorial process that will require some additional effort and collaboration, even after submission.

I started working with OLPC with the Give One Get One program back in 2007. Honestly speaking, at the time, I was more interested in getting an XO laptop for myself than in working for the project. I thought I could use the laptop to read plain textbooks from Project Gutenberg. Kindles were very expensive back then, and this looked like a good alternative. And it was. But, at the time, the Read Activity only worked with PDFs. In an effort to expand this functionality, I taught myself to program in Python, studied the code for the Read Activity, and created the Read Etexts Activity, which supported reading plain text files. Next, I decided that I wanted to have an Activity for reading comic books in CBZ format and created two of them: View Slides and Read SD Comics.

Photo of James Simmons with a copy of “Make your own Sugar Activities”. Simmons has been contributing to Sugar since 2007.

At the time, the best, and maybe only, way to learn how to create Activities was to study the code of existing ones. I’m a systems analyst, so that wasn’t too difficult for me, since I already had some of the important skills needed to do this. But this situation wasn’t great for teachers and their students who may want to create Activities but didn’t yet have the skills needed. In 2009 or so, I convinced myself to write a proper manual, which we called Make Your Own Sugar Activities! I did this using the Floss Manuals website. I was fortunate enough to have a very nice cover illustration done for me by Oceana Rain Fields, a student participating in the Rural Design Collective’s summer mentorship program. The printed book was given out as a door prize at one of the first OLPC conferences. The book was later translated into Spanish by a team of Sugar Labs volunteers as Como Hacer Una Actividad Sugar.

My personal involvement in Sugar Labs did not require any direct work with children, but, recently, I had the opportunity to introduce a young boy to Sugar. I had an old computer that I was going to give to a family friend, who was studying computer programming in college. His nine-year-old brother found out about it and wanted it for himself, so I installed the latest Sugar Learning Platform and updated my old Activities to run on Python 3. He is pleased to have the same operating system (OS) used by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) and enjoys playing Tux Kart. I look forward to introducing him to even more that Sugar has to offer in the coming months.

It’s nice to have the Sugar environment as an option for kids, as well as ways for the community to participate in the creation of new Activities.