Annual report for 2024
This report is meant to be an overview of the work Sugar Labs did in 2024. Looking back at 2024, we did a lot of work. We participated in events in the US and India. We mentored more than a dozen students over the length of the summer for Google Summer of Code and Dedicated Mentorship Program, the latter of which we participated in for the first time last year. We launched a series of online videos to showcase our work to the public while simultaneously giving a platform for young contributors to reflect upon their progress and to be introduced to a larger developer community. We created a handful of entirely new software projects for learning, such as new math games and Sugarizer activities. And we improved our existing software – implementing new features, fixing bugs, and making our learning software available on more platforms. We did all this and more in 2024, which I detail in more detail below.
In many aspects, this report is highly personal. I share about my own journeys to conferences, photos of the people I met, and the students to whom I introduce Sugar. In 2024, I became Sugar Labs’s first full-time staff member, which helped me to fully dedicate myself to many aspects of the organization. We were also able to sponsor community members like Anindya Kundu to represent Sugar Labs internationally. As you read this report, please understand that the vision for Sugar Labs as a nonprofit organization is to grow to be able to support more and more people like myself, so that we can have an even wider reach. And, that said, Sugar Labs, being a free/libre/open source community-driven project, makes its tools available to the public under free licenses, so that anyone may use what we’ve created to support teachers and classrooms in their respective communities, regardless of their “status” within the organization.
In other words, Sugar Labs is not a one-man-band. Instead, it’s a community of orchestras and ensembles. The organization is meant to support those orchestras and ensembles, comprised of teachers and learners, listening to and responding to their needs. It is my hope that 2025’s annual report includes even more stories and photos from the broader Sugar Labs community. Sugar Labs welcomes your interest, support, and contributions. I encourage you to join our community of teachers, learners, and parents working together to create better tools and a supportive environment for learning.
I hope that the annual publication of our work in the form of an executive summary will serve as a benchmark as we work toward continuous self-improvement as a nonprofit dedicated to serving our community of teachers and learners, all working together to create powerful tools for learning.
Development in 2024
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Dedicated Mentorship Program (DMP)
As for our work this summer, Sugar Labs participated in our fourteenth Google Summer of Code (GSoC) to assist students to work on eleven projects. This, combined with our first-ever participation in Code4GovTech’s Dedicated Mentorship Program (DMP), advanced our software development, mentoring a total of fourteen students who worked an estimated five-thousand hours on projects spanning the gamut from Maintaining and Porting Twelve Activities to Flatpak, to creating new math games, to creating promising new generative-AI services for both teachers and learners. To get a better sense of all that we accomplished this summer, you are encouraged to watch the Finale series of students’ presentations on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@SugarlabsOrg-EN. We also encourage you to check out the work in more detail by reading the reports published on Medium at https://medium.com/@sugarlabs/list/google-summer-of-code-d90eae4b54fb and https://medium.com/@sugarlabs/list/code4govtech-3377e03c6dd5.
Outreach and communications
Online events
In 2024, I also started a series of live events online where past and current contributors and students have a platform to tell their stories, as well as to invite guests from other organizations to discuss the future of technology-in-education. I did this because, although Sugar Labs’s impact is somewhat obvious to the many who are active in the community, I’ve found that there are still many untold stories from community members whose lives have been impacted by our work. As I’ve continued to speak to members of the community and published their stories, I’ve found that these previously untold stories continue to affirm the important role Sugar Labs plays in education. For example, in my interview with Ibiam Chihurumnaya, he shared how the Sugar Learning Platform and the Sugar community introduced him and his classmates to programming from a young age and has given him skills he continues to use to this very day.
Expanded social media presence
Last year, we expanded the ways people can follow our work on social media. In addition to the presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn, we are now on Bluesky, WhatsApp, and, my personal favorite, Mastodon.
If you are on any of these platforms, I recommend you follow Sugar Labs and boost our posts to help with our outreach efforts. And if you are interested in assisting us with our outreach efforts through social media, I encourage you to subscribe to our marketing mailing list and state your interest: https://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing.
Reboot of regular newsletters
In 2024, we relaunched regular newsletters, now going out approximately once every three months. These newsletters are intended to provide information about our progress as an organization, as well as news we believe to be valuable to our community.
- https://www.sugarlabs.org/community/2024/09/20/sweet-spot/
- https://www.sugarlabs.org/community/2024/12/29/sweet-spot-002/
Newsletter email subscription
Our newsletters are being published to the website, and they can also be sent directly to your inbox! In 2024, we started using professional mailing services with Buttondown to send out newsletters to email subscribers around the world. If you’re not already subscribed, please do so via https://buttondown.com/sugarlabs.
Reboot of Sugar Stories
Also in 2024, we began to solicit stories from members of our community. It’s still early into our ask for more stories, but we did receive an article from James Simmons sharing his work in helping others to create their own Sugar Activities. I also wrote an article about my perspective towards Sugar Labs, from the standpoint of both a parent and teacher.
You can read these stories and more at: https://www.sugarlabs.org/sugar-stories/
If you have a story to tell, please share it with us at info@sugarlabs.org or send it to the group at either of the following mailing lists: https://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep (mainly for education-related topics) or https://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel (mainly for development-related topics).
Major improvements to our website
Throughout the year, I did my best to update our website, which needed
some major updates. Being unfamiliar with Jekyll, which is what the
site was built with, I struggled for a few months to make more
significant improvements. Over the course of the year, thanks to
members of the free software community, I learned enough about Jekyll
to publish more regularly to
Near the end of 2024, more and more folks from the development community jumped in to assist in making improvements to the website. The website is doing much better now than it did at the beginning of 2024, and, looking ahead, this work spurred the current work towards a completely revamped version of the website. The launch of the new version of the website is planned for April, 2025.
My heartfelt appreciation goes to the many volunteers who assisted with our website. If you’re interested in joining the group working on the website, please join us at https://matrix.to/#/#sugarlabs-web:matrix.org.
Conference talks
In 2024, Sugar Labs was able to send representatives to attend a few in-person conferences. Although our budget is quite limited, we decided that attending conferences would help boost our visibility as an organization, so we invested time and money to send myself to a few conferences in the US, and we sponsored Sugar Labs community member Anindya Kundu to represent us at Opportunity Open Source Conference at IIT Kanpur.
LibrePlanet
In May, I attended the Free Software Foundation’s annual LibrePlanet conference in Boston, MA. There, I handed out flyers and showed off a computer running the Sugar Desktop Environment.
2024 Micro Camp
In June, I spent a weekend at a 2024 Micro Camp, a retreat for microtonal musicians, where I showcased Music Blocks visual programming language. Music Blocks, a flagship Sugar Labs project, has rich microtonal capabilities. I showcased those features for one of the first talks of the retreat, and I even used Music Blocks as a musical instrument to perform a piece of music that requires twenty-two divisions of the octave, for which I did not have an instrument capable of playing except for a programmed instrument I created within Music Blocks.
At the conference, I was also pleasantly surprised to meet so many free/libre/open source developers and educators. A large percentage – much larger a percentage than at most music conferences – were developing software. In retrospect, it makes sense that there are so many microtonalists who develop software because these musicians typically need to create instruments that will play pitches differently than what you would purchase in most stores, and they use both physical and digital medium to create such unique instruments.
22 EDO in Music Blocks.
Music Blocks has many affordances for tuning and temperament, an important concept in music. The program in this screenshot performs a 22 equal-divisions-of-the-octave (EDO) pitch whenever you touch one of the mice.
Music Blocks as an instrument
Devin (at right) performs a piece, written in 22 EDO, together with an ensemble using Music Blocks on a tablet.
Duo performance on Kite guitar and linnstrument
The ideas that inspire Music Blocks come from musical concepts, instruments, and traditions. Devin (at left) performs together with composer and microtonalist Kite Giedraitis.
CMK
In July, I attended Constructing Modern Knowledge (CMK), a retreat for teachers, in Manchester, NH. This retreat is a good fit for Sugar Labs as it is focused on Constructionism. CMK brings together passionate educators from around the world to work on new and creative projects, which they bring back to their respective schools.
First Day at CMK
Gary Stager is the organizer of CMK, a retreat for teachers to work together on Constructionism projects.
CMK projects
CMK participants are expected to work in groups create a project. On the final day, each group presents their project.
Guest speakers
The 2024 CMK brought two esteemed individuals working in music education, Tricia Tunstall (left) and Melissa Walker
Lego notation
Devin (at left) collaborated with Jamie Chelel (MIT) to create lego notation for the blind.
Detailed notation
Devin and Jamie created a simple and detailed notation system as a starting point to explore lego as a music notation system for the blind.
Fellow instructors
CMK attracts many passionate instructors. Devin (far left) had the pleasure of working together with Josh Burker (left), Tracy Rudzitis (right) and many others.
You can read my full article on the experience, as well as work done toward creating a system for using Lego blocks to encode musical data, here: https://medium.com/@sugarlabs/reflections-from-constructing-modern-knowledge-2024-1ce7d60fbb1c.
FOSSY 2024
In August, I attended FOSSY, hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy, in Portland, OR. I gave a talk titled “Mentoring youth: The FOSS strategy we’ve been looking for.” You can watch the talk on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKBXSC9Veq8.
I also ran two Birds of a feather sessions. One was a Music Blocks workshop, where Bryan Ollendyke of HAX tested the limits of the Javascript editor in Music Blocks. The other was a free/libre/open (FLO) music concert, where I joined Aaron Wolf, Timmy Barnett, Kite Giedraitis, and others to showcase FLO through instruments, software, and a variety of music.
Hacking on musical Javascript
Music Blocks has an export to Javascript feature, which got the attention of Bryan Ollendyke, creator of HAX.
Music Blocks's JS editor
Music Blocks is a waypoint not a destination. That's why we offer learners the option to export to Lilypond, MIDI, and Javascript.
Two Birds of a feather
At FOSSY, Devin gave one talk and led two Birds of a feather sessions. One session was for Music Blocks, and the other was a music concert.
Mariah Villarreal
Sugar Labs Google Code-In mentor and Libre Learn Lab director Mariah Villarreal (left) has dedicated her career to STEAM education and free software.
Meeting with good friends
Free software volunteer Jason Self attended FOSSY.
Making new connections
Bryan Ollendyke (left), creator of HAX, and his son attended the Music Blocks workshop at FOSSY.
Live musical performances
Devin performed together with microtonalist Kite Giedraitis at FOSSY.
FLO musicians
There were many "FLO musicians" at FOSSY. Among the musicians who performed in the concert who also gave a talk were Aaron Wolf of Snowdrift (2nd from the left), Timmy Barnett (third from left), and Devin Ulibarri (2nd from the right).
Playful
After the concert, audience members got a chance to play the instruments. Alternate tuning on the Linnstrument is made possible thanks to free/libre/open (FLO) source software, an important concept for Sugar Labs.
Internet-in-a-box demonstration
Also in August, I attended a meetup to demonstrate Internet-in-a-box (IIAB), led by Adam Holt. Kids and teachers got an opportunity to see what IIAB does and to try it. Sugarizer, the web-based version of the Sugar Learning Platform, is among the packages chosen for IIAB, which empowers schools to use learning services that would otherwise require an internet connection.
Internet in a Box
Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) is a solution for communities that do not have internet access. It acts as a server with educational software and services pre-installed.
Sugarizer
Sugarizer is one of the programs that comes pre-installed on IIAB.
GSoC Mentor Summit
Sugar Labs has participated in GSoC almost every year since 2009. This year, we worked on a number of projects. I was sent to represent Sugar Labs at the conference, hosted at Google headquarters. He met with other mentors, attended talks, and gave a lightning talk on our unique approaches to mentoring.
Sameer Verma
Sameer Verma (at left) is the organizer for OLPC San Francisco and has documented some of Sugar Labs's growth over the years in the form of interviews.
Karen Sandler
Karen Sandler (at right) is the executive director for Software Freedom Conservancy, which acted as fiscal sponsor Sugar Labs until 2019.
Google Summer of Code mentors
Google hosts many orgs and many, many mentors for GSoC every year. Devin is at lower-left.
Opportunity Open Source Conference at IIT Kanpur
Sugar Labs was invited to present at Opportunity Open Source Conference at IIT Kanpur, so we sponsored community member and Music Blocks v4 maintainer Anindya Kundu to represent our organization. Anindya presented his journey in Sugar Labs through a talk titled “The ‘build to learn’ guide for Google Summer of Code and beyond.”
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Interested in representing Sugar Labs at a conference? Please reach out to us at info@sugarlabs.org for presentation feedback and handout materials.
Boston Code Camp
Sugar Labs executive director Devin Ulibarri and board member Walter Bender led a session for Boston Code Camp on November 23, 2024 titled “Create musical code with Music Blocks” where they introduced Music Blocks to an audience of educators and technologists.
Music Blocks co-creators
Devin Ulibarri (at left) and Walter Bender (at right) have been working together on Music Blocks since its start in 2014.
Phrase Maker widget
Devin and Walter presented Music Blocks at Boston Code Camp in November.
Sugar Labs in the Classroom
Music Blocks
This year marked a lot of progress in research and development for Music Blocks visual programming language. In tandem with the coding we did as GSoC over the summer, I found as many ways as possible to bring the new features to students, teachers, and classrooms.
I worked together with one of my students, Nathan, who has studied music with me for about a decade and has also taken over a year of Music Blocks classes directly from Walter Bender. Together, we tested the new AI features, such as MIDI import, as well as experimental features, such as music transcription and lesson plan generators.
At around the same time, I worked together with teachers who were preparing innovative Music Blocks lessons and reporting any bugs they found and feature requests.
Nathan
Nathan (at back) has studied with Devin for ten years. Over the summer, Nathan came in regularly to test new Music Blocks features that were being developed as part of Google Summer of Code.
Musician and programmer duo
Two instructors for a summer camp at MAP Family Learning Center worked together to create lessons for different themes, such as Egypt, Spain, and India. One instructor is primarily a programmer, the other is a Berklee-trained musician.
Lesson plan generator
One of the projects for GSoC was a LLM-enabled lesson plan generator. Nathan (at right) and I tested it as we were helping the instructors create lesson plans for five weeks of summer classes.
Music+Code
Nathan was eventually recruited to help the instructors create lesson plans. He utilized his knowledge and understanding of both music and programming to create projects for the students.
Musical debugging
Nathan created unique projects for Music Blocks, which are now uploaded to the Planet. He had to debug both the music and the logic in order to make his projects work.
Summer fun
Lesson plans created by Nathan and the two teachers were used over the summer. The students had a great time, and we received important feedback to improve Music Blocks.
Sugar Learning Platform and Sugar Activities
I started teaching a small group of kindergarten and first graders in the fall using the Sugar Learning Platform. We started with a few One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptops that I have and later moved onto newer hardware. The students really fell in love with their computers, calling the chat robot their “robot friend”, creating art and music, and playing games.
I worked with them on all sorts of things, from spelling to problem-solving, and the foundation that we built in the fall has transitioned into programming with Turtle Blocks. This class continues to this day. It has been a joy for the students and it’s been informative for me. Plus, my experience in the classroom has helped me send feedback to the developers for improvement.
First introduction
Devin ran "Sugar classes" for kindergarten and second grade in the fall.
Robot friend
The students in Devin's class expressed much joy as they explored the tools in Sugar.
Computer surprise
Soon after the computers were introduced to the students, one student brought in her own computer. She had drawn a computer with a monitor and keyboard, modeled after her experience using Sugar.
Students helping students
Devin's son Kai (at right) helped the students in their first weeks.
First steps
At first, the computers took some getting used to. Now, the students understand the basics.
Joyful learning
The students had a blast learning together with the Sugar Learning Platform.
Teaching Git to students of Everett High School
In the spring, a couple teachers at a local high school approached me about training their students to prepare to work in collaborative software development. I met with the students twice and followed up by email and on our group chat to help them get started with git version control, the command line, and their first contributions to our repositories.
First inception into git
The high school students were eager to contribute. Contributing to free/libre/open source projects like Sugar Labs typically requires version-control collaborative tools like git.
Students and teachers of Everett High School
Devin (at left) met with the students of Everett High School two times to get them started as contributors for Sugar Labs.
Finances
Last year, I spent time working on our finances: where we keep our money, what platforms can be used to donate to our organization, and increasing the number of financial tools we have available to us. I did this work, in large part, so that charitable donations can be made with confidence, ultimately helping every financial contribution we receive go further. I won’t go into all the details here, but one thing I did in order to make our finances more transparent is update and publish our 990s to our website. All of our tax filings are now up to date and published on https://www.sugarlabs.org/donate/ under “Our 990 tax filings.”
I also helped Sugar Labs secure in-kind services that help our daily operations at no cost to us. This year, we received Open Source Credits from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are helping us test and develop new educational software; we received over one-hundred terabytes of data storage through Google Workspace for nonprofits, and we received other in-kind services that are helping us run our organization more efficiently.
Lastly, I laid the groundwork for receiving financial contributions through every.org via ACH, Stocks, and even cryptocurrency. I successfully applied for Sugar Labs to be added to the PayPal Giving Fund, which has opened the door to other ways of giving that use the platform as an authority. Employers can now find us on Benevity. Both of these are live now in 2025, the result of work done in 2024.
Ways to give:
- https://www.every.org/sugar-labs>
- https://causes.benevity.org/causes/840-843289298>
- https://mygoodness.benevity.org/community/cause/840-843289298/donate>
- https://www.paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/4357440> (for businesses)
- https://www.sugarlabs.org/donate/> (up-to-date list of methods to give)
In-kind donations
We received eleven Thinkpads (X1 Yogas) from Beacon Communities, LLC in April. These laptops all have touchscreens, which are helpful for the kids, and have been used to teach both Sugar Activities and Music Blocks.
Installing Trisquel on the donated machines
Trisquel is a distribution of GNU/Linux that offers a version for download that has the Sugar Learning Platform as its default.
Super Tux
The computers were received near the end of the school year, so the obvious way to test them out was to let the kids play with them.
Teacher and intern training
The donated computers helped us train teachers and interns to use Music Blocks.
Nine upcycled computers
These nine computers are now property of Sugar Labs. They've been used since we've received them to teach Sugar and Music Blocks, as well as to test new code created by GSoC participants.
Touch screens
All of the donated laptops have touchscreens.
Multimedia
Students are able to interact with the computers via touch and with a mouse. They also ahve headphones they can use to hear sounds from the computers.
AWS open-source credits
In 2024, we applied for and won open-source credits worth $8,000, which will help us test the LLM and neural network services we developed over the summer.
New Sugar Labs merchandise for sale
We had a little bit of fun in our fundraising efforts last year. Inspired by people reaching out to us about merchandise and questions about how to buy Sugar, we now offer a variety of merchandise, including clothing items such as hoodies and t-shirts in different colors. We also have SoaS (Sugar on a Stick) USBs available for purchase. In order to offer these products with the least amount of overhead cost to our organization, we partnered with two vendors, Bonfire and USB Memory Direct. You can purchase clothing merchandise on our Bonfire page and bootable USBs on our USB Memory Direct page, Plus, proceeds support Sugar Labs’s mission to create learning software for education through Constructionist principles.
Landing page for USBs
USB Memory Direct partnered with us to sell and distribute USBs with Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) pre-installed.
T-shirts and hoodies
In 2024, we started a merchandise store through Bonfire.
SOAS delivered to your door
The test package came with smarties and a sticker. The USB was tested and proven to work as expected.
Fun fashion
Our store on Bonfire offers a range of colors and styles.
To view and purchase our merchandise, please go to: https://www.sugarlabs.org/products/.
Read more about the launch of our products: https://www.sugarlabs.org/community/2025/01/21/SoaS-USB-announcement/.
2024 accounting details: Revenue and expenses
For 2024, we had a net loss of $62,629.28. Here’s the breakdown for revenue and expenses:
- Revenue: $7,872.86
- Expenses: $70,502.14
In more detail, here were our top 2024 Expenses:
- Payroll expenses: $45,136.99
- Contractor expenses: $9,978.19
- Taxes: $6,356.05
- Lawyer fees and accountant fees: $2,793.00
- Travel (to and from conferences): $2,792.66
- Conference fees: $1,345.00
- Other (mail services, marketing, insurance, government fees, web hosting): $2,100.25
And here’s our 2024 Income by category:
- Google: $6,700.00
- Donations**: $786.05
- Interest income (our new US Bank checking account gives us interest): $350.57
- Sales (Bonfire clothing): $36.24
**Note: We use the cash method for accounting, so donations that were sent in 2024 but not deposited until 2025 are not here.
In-kind donations
In the fall of 2024, I applied for Open Source Credits from Amazon Web Services in the amount of $8,000. We successfully received those credits, and we’re planning to use them to deploy and test the projects that we created during GSoC 2024.
Membership
We made one significant update to our membership last year. In the weeks leading up to this year’s election, we asked our community to reapply for membership. We did this because our bylaws require a majority vote from members to pass certain amendments. Because of this, we decided to make participation in the election a mandatory requirement for maintaining membership or becoming a new member).
Otherwise, the criteria for becoming a member is the same as before. As you can read on our membership page, “any ‘significant and sustained’ contributor to Sugar Labs is eligible for membership. Although it is difficult to specify a precise definition, a contributor generally must have contributed to a non-trivial improvement of the Sugar project or Sugar Labs activity. Contributions may be code, documentation, translations, maintenance of project-wide resources, running a Sugar deployment, or other non-trivial activities which benefit Sugar Labs.”
We encourage anyone making “significant and sustained” contributions to Sugar Labs – whether those contributions are code or not – to apply for membership. Membership affords you voting rights.
Read more about membership, and how to apply for membership, at https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Members.
Election
In 2024, Sugar Labs ran an election for members to its Board of Directors for the 2024-25 cycle, the results of which were announced on December 19, 2024. The winners of the election were Devin Ulibarri, Sumit Srivastava, and Sebastian Silva.
You can read more about the election process and results on Sugar Labs’s website:
- https://www.sugarlabs.org/community/2024/11/08/fall-board-elections-how-to-participate/
- https://www.sugarlabs.org/community/2024/11/22/elections-extension/
- https://www.sugarlabs.org/community/2024/12/19/election-results/
Management and Board
Devin Ulibarri stepped into the role of executive director in 2024, and, as mentioned in “Election” above, Sugar Labs members voted three new members to the board, filling one vacancy.