Sugar: Linux and open source for education

We have already spoken in various articles on this blog about the importance of Linux and open source software for teaching, not only because it allows it to reach the most disadvantaged classes by saving licenses and poor countries, but also because of the flexibility, the number of educational projects that exist and the benefits of the code being open so that students can learn with he.

When you learn programmingI don't know about you, but you can start with a book from which you may learn something. Maybe you access a classroom or online class to learn programming and start doing your first tests, but how you really learn is by practicing and seeing the source code of other software written by other developers. You can start with simple programs and modify them to do something different ...

Something as simple as a modification will make you learn quite a few things about this topic quite well. But regardless of that and of projects such as the Edubuntu, LinuxKidX, Kano OS (and Kano Kit) distros, openSUSE Li-FE, Ubermix, Edubuntu, Guadalinex Edu, DouDou Linux, etc., which we have already talked about and many others that exist that we have not mentioned in this blog, today we are going to talk about unknown to many: Sugar (GUI). It is created in Python by contributors such as Christopher Blizzard, Diana Fong, Walter Bender, etc.

Sugar is an interface for a Linux distro that has a graphical interface designed for the project One Laptop Per Child, to computerize children with fewer resources on XO computers. You can try it thanks to the version sugar on a stick, and you will see that it is very different from what you can imagine if you have seen its competitors ... It is ideal for educational environments, so that children can learn to discover new functionalities of the OS as they use it and from a very early age (~ 3 years) .