Fedora

Discover. Reflect. Share. Learn.

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Sugar on a Stick is a Fedora-based operating system featuring the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform and designed to fit on an ordinary USB thumbdrive ("stick"). Originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child Project and designed specifically as a 1-to-1 computing environment for K-8 students to collaborate with others in exploring the world around them, Sugar is used every day by over one and a half million students in classrooms throughout the world. It is now deployable for the cost of a stick rather than a laptop; students can take their Sugar on a Stick thumbdrive to any machine - at school, at home, at a library or community center - and boot their customized computing environment without touching the host machine’s hard disk or existing system at all.

The heart of the Sugar Learning Platform is its Activities for children - fun and engaging programs for reading e-books, writing, drawing, browsing the Internet, programming, and so on. Each Activity is designed to achieve specific pedagogical goals.

A thriving community-created ecosystem of Activities can be found at the Sugar Labs Activities Portal. Activities take full advantage of computer-based learning, from interactive speech synthesis for beginning readers to tools for remixing open content into customized digital libraries for your local classroom.

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Sugar automatically saves your progress to a "Journal" on your stick, so teachers and parents can easily pull up "all collaborative web browsing sessions done in the past week" or "papers written with Daniel and Sarah in the last 24 hours" with a simple query rather than memorizing complex file/folder structures.

The source code for each Activity is available right from the application itself with the "View Source" feature, meaning that students can see exactly how their favorite applications work - and perhaps how to make them even better. Tinkering encouraged! An international community of learners, teachers, deployers, and developers is always there to help classrooms turn their feedback and ideas for improvement into reality.

Join us in enabling children to reclaim computers for themselves - we need contributors of all ages, backgrounds, and types to help us bring open source personal computing to classrooms as a tool for enabling exploration. Learn More.

About

What is Sugar on a Stick?

Information is about nouns. Learning is about verbs. Designed specifically for children and based on cognitive and social constructivism, the Sugar user interface differs from traditional user interfaces with their "office productivity" orientation. To see the difference for yourself, check out the guided video tour.

The fourth Sugar on a Stick release, "Mango Lassi", is a slim, stable version of the Sugar Learning Platform featuring a few classroom-tested Activities and designed for remixability and customization by adventurous students, families, and small classroom deployments who want to try something different and help shape the future of personalized learning for children around the world.

Our principles

The Sugar Learning Platform

Two Principles define the Sugar Learning Platform:

• We learn through doing, so if we want more learning, we want more doing.
• Love is a better master than duty - you want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. Internal motivation almost always trumps external motivations.

The Design of Sugar

Three experiences characterize the design of Sugar:

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• Discovering: Sugar can accommodate a wide variety of users, with different levels of skill in terms of reading, language, and different levels of experience with computing. It is easy to approach, yet it doesn’t put an upper bound on personal expression. One can peel away layers and go deeper and deeper, with no restrictions.
• Reflecting: Sugar uses "Journal" to record each learner’s activity. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress.
• Sharing: The Sugar interface always shows the presence of other learners. Collaboration is a first-order experience. Students and teachers dialog with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas.

The Sugar Labs Community

Three principles define the Sugar Labs community:

• Everyone is a teacher and a learner.
• Humans by their nature are social beings.
• Humans by their nature are expressive.

Join us!

If these ideas excite you, we invite you to join our community of contributors and help us bring the Sugar Learning Platform to children around the world. No prior experience with computers or educational technology is required - in fact, we actively encourage a diversity of backgrounds, ages, and perspectives since our ultimate goal is to make the Sugar experience deployable by classroom teachers and supportable by older students and the local community. We need packagers, testers, developers, curriculum designers, local deployers, and more. For more information, check out our OpenHatch page and our Sugar on a Stick contributors portal on the main Sugar Labs wiki.

Downloads

Sugar on a Stick

Installable Live Media

This is the latest version of Sugar on a Stick, and is everything you need to try it out with your USB thumbdrive ("stick") of 1GB or larger. For a guided walkthrough of the process of creating and using your stick, including on non-Fedora systems or using virtualization, read the Creation Kit. More details on installation, including instructions on how to remix your own custom Sugar on a Stick version, are available from the main Sugar on a Stick wiki.

Torrent Download

32-bit PC Edition

This edition is for the highest compatibility; it will work on both 32-bit and 64-bit computers.

Download Now!

54K Torrent File for 32-bit PC ISO
How do I use this file?

64-bit PC Edition

Enjoy the full power and speed of a 64-bit computer. Not compatible with 32-bit computers.

Download Now!

54K Torrent File for 64-bit PC ISO
How do I use this file?

Direct Download

32-bit PC Edition

This edition is for the highest compatibility; it will work on both 32-bit and 64-bit computers.

Download Now!

500MB for 32-bit PC ISO
How do I use this file?

64-bit PC Edition

Enjoy the full power and speed of a 64-bit computer. Not compatible with 32-bit computers.

Download Now!

500MB for 64-bit PC ISO
How do I use this file?

Unsure if your computer is 32-bit or 64-bit?

• The 32-bit edition is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit PCs.
• Read our documentation on how to tell if your computer is 32-bit or 64-bit.

Older releases of this spin can be found at archive.fedoraproject.org.

Sugar on a Stick Support

Need help using the Sugar on a Stick? We have put together a list of resources you can use to get help below. For help downloading, running, and installing spins, please visit the main spins support page.

Help via Chat

Users and developers are available in the #sugar irc channel on irc.freenode.net for real-time conversations.

General help is available in irc channel #fedora on irc.freenode.net.

For help using IRC, please visit the Fedora IRC how-to.

Help via Email

Users and developers are also available on the mailing list at soas@lists.sugarlabs.org.

• Subscribe to the list.
• Post a message to the list.

General help with Fedora is available on the Fedora users' mailing list at users@lists.fedoraproject.org.

• Subscribe to the list.
• Post a message to the list.

For guidance on how to interact on Fedora mailing lists, please review the Fedora Mailing List Guidelines.

Documentation

Specific documentation and tutorials are available at the upstream website. Direct links to some highlights from Sugar Labs are listed below.

• Sugar Labs

General Help Using Fedora

Sometimes you may encounter an issue with this spin that you can get help with using general Fedora support resources. A list of those resources is available at the Fedora 'Get Help' page.