Reflections as a parent and teacher: Sugar at home and in the classroom

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to take some time to reflect upon how I’ve used Sugar both in the classroom and at home. I have a few hopes in mind as I share my experience engaging with Sugar both as a teacher and a parent. One hope is that it will show a window into some of the more grounded work Sugar Labs has done this year.

Much of the most recent testimony that we’ve shared from the Sugar Labs community has been centered around software development. While the success of students creating software is certainly important, the purpose of such progress is grounded in helping teachers teach and to help learners learn. Another hope is that the following vignettes will dispel doubts around the efficacy of the Sugar Learning Platform as an effective tool for education, which I’ve heard from a few folks during conversations throughout my first year as Sugar Labs’s executive director. This article will address those doubts directly. My third hope is that my experiences will inspire others, whether parents or teachers (or both), to try Sugar themselves.

The first few years as a parent

My son Kai was born in 2017, but it was about three years before his birth that I became involved in Sugar Labs. It’s a story that I’ve told in more depth before, but I became interested in Sugar Labs because of their unique approach to education. At the time, I was doing research on the implications of software-freedom-in-education, which led me to conclude that the freedoms granted to users in free/libre/open (FLO) source software have profound positive implications for education. I attended a talk given by Sugar Labs founder Walter Bender, and we soon began working together to integrate music into Turtle Blocks, in what is now known as Music Blocks visual programming language. It was also around this time in 2014 that I received a One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop from Walter that I used to familiarize myself with the Sugar Learning Platform.

Although I had shown Kai a few things on the OLPC when he was a toddler, such as creating a paint program for him in the Turtle Blocks Activity, it wasn’t until he was about four years old that he really took to it. His first, most sustained, interest in the computer came when he was learning to read by himself. I remember that his desire to read was basically insatiable. In fact, he had memorized some sections of the graphic novel series Dog Man by Dav Pilkey, which I had read to him multiple times because he loved it so much. At four years old, Kai had memorized a lot of the story, but he wasn’t yet reading himself; he was still dependent on others to read for him. It was at this point that he found the Speak Activity on his OLPC, and this is when he had a real breakthrough with reading.

Kai, with his OLPC, running the Speak Activity on the Sugar Learning Platform.

The basic way that the Speak Activity works is by taking typed input from a user and speaking it back to them when they press return. I remember Kai walking around the house, finding words on various things around the house, typing those words into the computer, and listening to the result. It was in this way that he memorized the spelling of a few words, and, soon enough, he was creating sentences and telling the computer to speak those words back to him (or to me). It was also around this time that we went on a long family road trip, where Kai sat in the back seat typing various words and sentences and learning more and more about language.

Kai, helping one of my students get up and running in Sugar for her first time.

Of course, I kept reading books to him, which is still invaluable to a child’s development, but I am confident that the Speak Activity helped Kai become a more independent reader. The following year, Kai entered Kindergarten, where he learned phonics and he’s been a solid reader ever since. He’s now in second grade, and he often carries a few books around with him every day, everywhere he goes.

Reflections as a teacher in 2024

This year, I had a few memorable moments as a teacher in the classroom. This year, I mentored high school students in git version control, mentored another teacher in leading a Music Blocks class, and I even taught a group class for kids ages five and six on the Sugar Learning Platform. I’ll share a little bit of what I learned from each experience here.

Students in a Music Blocks class led by Rafael Moreno, who I guide as a teacher new to teaching programming.

Before the summer, I reached out to an acquaintance, Neil Plotnik, who teaches cybersecurity at a nearby high school. I met Neil during my time at the Free Software Foundation (FSF). He suggested that I reach out to the Computer Science (CS) teacher at his high school. Long story short, I spent a few weeks getting these youth ready to help with coding, mainly teaching them how to use git version control. These students had done a few coding projects at their school, but hadn’t yet contributed to a community project. They hadn’t used git before, which is important to know for software development (and the underlying concepts are important skills for any endeavor), so I spent most of the time showing them the basics. To be honest, I was a little bit surprised to find myself teaching git to a CS class, but I suppose this highlights one of the many reasons why an organization such as Sugar Labs is important. Sugar Labs offers pathways into collaborative software development that textbook coding exercises do not.

Over the summer, I mentored a few contributors for Google Summer of Code (GSoC). A lot of this work is online, on our Medium blog and our YouTube channel. At the same time, however, I also worked with a student of mine, Nathan, who asked to have some internship experience over the summer. I’ve taught this particular student for almost ten years now. He’s taken guitar lessons with me, and he’s taken Music Blocks classes with Walter Bender and myself. First, I asked him to create some fun projects for kids, which he did with gusto. You can read about his projects here: https://musicblocks.net/2024/08/05/nyc-interactive-subway/ and https://musicblocks.net/2024/07/18/sitar-tabla-and-tampura-for-makey-makey/. Then, I asked him to create lesson plans, which he also did very well. And then, near the end of the summer, I involved him with testing some of the latest development for Music Blocks, which included a few AI projects. Testing these required that he set up a development environment, test the software as a user, and report the results as issues on GitHub. His work over the summer marked a good amount of growth and progress, which continues to this day.

Nathan, testing new features for Music Blocks.

At the beginning of the school year in the fall, I began mentoring a fellow teacher who is leading a Music Blocks class on a weekly basis. I provide the teacher, Rafael Moreno, guidance in lesson planning and feedback on classes. Rafael is a singer from Panama, now living in Boston, MA, working as a teaching artist.

Also in the fall, I started teaching kindergarten and first grade students in a weekly computer class. This class happens at the same time as Rafael teaches Music Blocks. We decided to split the group by age, and I decided that my (younger) group would benefit most from doing something a little more open ended and basic. So, for the first day, I prepared some OLPC laptops for the kids, and I had them just try the Speak Activity. They had a blast. At one point, I tried to show them another Activity, but they insisted on continuing with the Speak Activity. The following week, we had a new student and I didn’t have more than two OLPCs, so I prepared two Thinkpad X1s with Sugar Toast installed for the new student and for Kai, who joined us that day to show the group what else the computers could do. Kai did a wonderful job leading this second day of classes, and it was heartwarming to see him share his knowledge with his new friends in the class. As of now, I’ve taught this class for a few months, and the kids have explored several of the Activities, including Maze, Write, Chat, Turtle Blocks, and several of the games. At the end of each class, the kids are asked to share with the class what they’re working on. And, on the last day of class before the break, they presented their work to their parents.

Two of my students, smiling during their second class, using the Sugar Learning Platform on two OLPCs.

One of the things that strikes me the most from this particular class is the joy that the kids show as they’re working on their activities. It reminds me of a study I read by Bloom, described in Robert J. Trotter’s article for Psychology Today, July 1986, “The Mystery of Mastery”. Studying how people achieve mastery, Bloom observed a few common factors among those who became experts as adults. The children who later became experts were introduced to the field as a playful activity, and learning at this stage was “like a game.” As for Sugar, the kids in my class are learning a lot of things in the class, such as spelling, typing, and language, but the playfulness they exhibit is developmentally appropriate. This is consistent with the research on human development, and I’ve found it to hold true during my own work in the classroom.

Here are the notes I took in college that I used to reference the above paragraph. I add it here because I no longer have access to the original article, and I could not find a copy online. If you find a link to a electronic copy, please drop it into the comments below.

Conclusions

As I alluded to earlier, I have sometimes heard criticism of the Sugar Learning Platform, suspecting that it may be out of touch with the needs of the students. The criticism is typically accompanied by an argument that youth should be preparing for job skills by using a platform more similar to what an office worker uses (e.g. Shouldn’t the kids be taught how to use Microsoft Word instead?). However, as an educator, I’ve never bought that argument. And now that I’ve spent ten years with Sugar — both as an educator and as a parent — I wholly reject it. I can say confidently that youth learn very important skills through their engagement with Sugar. And perhaps most importantly, they are introduced to concepts in stages that are appropriate to their development.

One of the students in my Sugar class. She surprised me by coming in with this hand-drawn computer, which she made just a few days after taking one of her first classes.

I’m more proud than I ever have been to be a part of the Sugar community, and my decades’ long experience with youth from ages five through college, only gives me stronger conviction that we’re creating something of unique value for education.