Welcome to the Sugar students site. Here you will find all you need to get started with Sugar.
“Learning with Sugar is something a child does, not something that is done to or for a child.” – Walter Bender
Sugar is a collection of hundreds of tools designed to introduce children to programming, computational thinking, and problem-solving. Sugar has no set curriculum; its best practice is to immerse children in problem-solving and debugging. Children are given agency to work on problems they are passionate about in a context where there is an expectation that there were no predetermined solutions or prescribed paths to a solution. As Solomon observed, “debugging is the greatest learning opportunity of the 21st century.” While engaged in problem-solving, children are developing and refining the algorithms employed by the agents in the various levels of their cognitive towers.
While computation and coding are at the heart of Sugar, Sugar is not programming curriculum: computational thinking goes well beyond the realm of learning to code. While the specific algorithms they discuss—searching, sorting, optimal stopping, predicting, etc.—are useful in and of themselves, the real power of computational thinking lies it its systematic approach to debugging and problem-solving. Learning that problems can be addressed systemically is the underlying “powerful idea” of programming. The process of writing and then repairing or “debugging” a program provides a basis for active learning through trial and error, regardless of what the problem that is actually being solved.
These books are recommended as a rich source of ideas on how to use Sugar in and out of the classroom: