Sugar Labs Announces Beta‑1 of Sugar on a Stick, LiveUSB Version of Sugar Learning Platform for Children

Apr 22 2009

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Cambridge, MA, April 22, 2009: Sugar Labs™ announces the availability for testing of Sugar on a Stick Beta‑1. This version of the free open-source Sugar Learning Platform, available at www.sugarlabs.org for loading on any 1 Gb or greater USB stick, is designed to facilitate exploration of the award-winning Sugar interface beyond its original platform, the One Laptop per Child XO‑1, to such varied hardware as aging PCs and recent Macs to the latest netbooks.

Teachers and parents interested in trying Sugar with children can download the Sugar on a Stick beta‑1 file from the Sugar Labs website and load it onto a USB stick by following the instructions at wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_S tick.

Walter Bender, Executive Director of Sugar Labs, said “Sugar is perfectly suited for children in the classroom with its simple, colorful interface, built-in collaboration, and open architecture. Sugar on a Stick lets you start a computer with Sugar and store a child’s data on the stick without touching the host computer’s hard disk. Sugar’s Activities such as Write, a shared word processor, and the recently announced InfoSlicer Activity, which enables teachers to easily collect and package web-based content for the classroom, benefit fully from Sugar’s collaboration features.”

Caroline Meeks of Solution Grove (www.solutiongrove.com), the Sugar on a Stick project manager, commented: “We’re counting on teachers to help us improve Sugar on a Stick as we work towards our Version‑1 release scheduled for Q3

  1. We just presented Sugar on a Stick at the FOSS VT conference (http://www.ncose.org/node/47) where it generated great interest, and our real-world tests at local sites with varied aging PCs have been very encouraging.”

Sugar testers are invited to send bug information and constructive criticism to feedback@sugarlabs.org. “We won’t be able to reply to every message,” continued Ms. Meeks, “but we will read every one in order to make Sugar on a Stick a reliable learning tool in budget-stretched classrooms by the fall.”

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