Your donation directly assists us in achieving our mission

Despite the fact that computers, and the software on those computers, run the way much of the world works, there still remains very little support in education, especially at the levels of primary and secondary schooling, to cultivate a computationally literate society. Despite initiatives, a mere “day of code,” sometimes as little as “an hour of code,” is woefully insufficient to instill computational literacy in a generation of young learners, especially when those youth will be living in a world where their social, financial, and democratic interactions & participation is proxied via software, algorithms, and, now, large language models.

Sugar Labs, as an organization, and the suite of apps, curriculum, rubrics, and mentoring, is well poised to bridge the gap for many learners in the US and around the world – the gap between educational services provided and what youth need developmentally to succeed.

Financial contributions to Sugar Labs helps us continue to create and maintain innovative tools for learning, as well as mentor youth at a critical point in their development. Over the years, we've created over three-hundred tools for learning that are used around the globe, mentored students for thousands of hours, and have assisted schools in bringing project-based learning activities into their classroom.

Our History

The Sugar education initiative began at One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit initiative with the mission of transforming education for children around the world; this mission was to be achieved by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices. Sugar was, and still is, the community of teachers and learners working together to create software and curriculum for the OLPC laptop.

The pedagogical foundations of Sugar come from a long history of educational research. Sugar is a direct descendant of Logo, originally developed by Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon, and Wally Feurzeig, and the work of prestigious educators such as Alan Kay, Marvin Minsky, Edith Ackerman, Idit Harel, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky, among others, also influenced the design. In this vein, Sugar Labs developers continue to interact with educational researchers to maintain the highest quality learning experience.

The development of Sugar began in 2005 when Walter Bender—then executive director of the Media Lab and a member of the original OLPC team—began a software initiative specifically aimed at creating educational software for OLPC laptops. At the time, there were no student contributors to Sugar, but the software and community was designed with their future contributions in mind. Now, approximately 10 percent of all Sugar activities have been written by preteen-age children!

How is it possible that young children are able to create activities to be used by others? Because development is done in an open, transparent manner, it welcomes students to learn. Students may start as users of a learning tool, but as their curiosity grows they are invited to download the source code of the tool(s) used. The student can read and study the very same source code created by the developers (who are teachers and mentors). By studying this source code, and asking questions to mentors in the community, students deepen their understanding of how the tools work. In time, these students build a solid foundation of knowledge they can use to do more sophisticated things.

Since most of the world that today’s children live in technologically-speaking is aimed at cultivating consumers, not contributors, we believe passionately that our paradigm is critically important today. If the world is to have citizens who are literate and empowered with their technology, we need to raise them in a paradigm such as we have Sugar Labs. Above all, Sugar Labs empowers teachers and learners with tools and knowledge in a community where it is fun, safe, and effective to do so.