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INTERVIEW WITH WALTER BENDER

Versión Español


Walter Bender is the founder and executive director of Sugar Labs, whose mission is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform. Sugar Labs is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, and teach with the Sugar learning platform. Bender is past-president for software and content evelopment of One Laptop per Child, a not-for-profit association that developed the first netbook computer which are being used by more than one-million children worldwide. Before taking his leave of absence from MIT, Bender was executive director of the MIT Media Laboratory and holder of the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Chair.
Walter Bender will attend the International congress VISION 2009 and IV FREEDOM OPEN SOURCE DAY organized by San Martin de Porres University, Engineering and Architecture Faculty to be effected on October 24th 2009 and conceded us an interview for us before his arrival.



Gonzalo Chevarría: Lets talk about learning. Which methodology do you think is the best when you use for the first time SUGAR? Any advice for the teachers?

Walter: I would recommend that teachers start by using Sugar to enhance some curriculum goal that they are already familiar with. For example, I recently worked with 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms where the teachers had their students use the Memorize activity to create games that used the vocabulary from their geography lessons. The students were really engaged and had to put their knowledge to work. They combined writing, drawing, and downloading images from the Wikipedia. They shared their games with classmates and gave each other feedback as they played. It was an easy task technically, and yet it exposed the teachers and the students to many of the powerful ideas we have embedded into Sugar: guided discovery, open-ended construction, collaboration and critique. The activity drilled home the vocabulary because, “the playfulness of childhood is the most demanding teacher we have.” (Marvin Minsky)

Gonzalo Chevarría: How do you see SUGAR development in Latin America?

Walter: By far the largest number of Sugar deployments are in Latin America. There are of course major deployments in Peru and Uruguay. Almost every country in the region has at least some pilots underway. So it is quite natural, with such a large user-base, that more development will happen in Latin America. Naturally, there has been development work done in direct support of deployments in the region; this includes much infrastructure work and a wealth of materials in support of pedagogy. And there are some great Sugar Activities that originated in the region, e.g., Conozco Uruguay and Habla con Sara. The Ceibal Jams and the Open Source Days at San Martin de Porres have been productive forums for both raising awareness and the generation of code. I have three goals for Latin America for the next year: (1) grow the grassroots community and better integrate its efforts into the formal deployments; (2) provide more channels of feedback from teachers to Sugar developers (the Sur list is a great start but we need to hear more directly from teachers); and (3) make more contributions to Sugar platform itself—we have ambitious goals and need more help to achieve them.


Gonzalo Chevarría:What is SUGAR LABS target after the SUGAR 0.84 release?

Walter: The feature list for Sugar 0.86 is posted in ourwiki (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.86/Feature_List). Highlights include a new toolbar design that will make it easier to navigate within activities and a new underlying window manager that will make Sugar more readily compatible with existing GNU/Linux applications. 0.86 is scheduled for release in late September, in time to be included in the Fedora 12 release scheduled for November. We are already planning Sugar 0.88 (scheduled for late March or early April 2010) and will be having a planning meeting in November at Sugar Camp at the November South Tyrol Free Software Conference. Some of the ideas being planned are described here(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features).


Gonzalo Chevarría:Which are the best ways to get a relationship between teachers and developers for the development of more and better educative activities?

Walter: Communication and feedback are critical. I am encouraged by the creative uses of Sugar in the classroom but we need to find more channels in which teachers are comfortable communicating about what they are doing and learning. (Developers are in irc.freenode.net #sugar 24/7, but that does not seem to be a place that teachers are comfortable joining.) Blogging is one option. Many teachers blog on the Project Ceibal site. Bill Kerr, a teacher in Australia, has his students blog about their Sugar experiences as well—quite revealing. My long-term ambition is that more teachers themselves will become developers. I am amazed the extent to which teachers are already taking on this role. Within 24 hours of our publishing a new Physics activity, a teacher posted a page in the wiki on how to modify the activity (See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Modifying_Activities#Modifying_Physics).

Gonzalo Chevarría:How can new SUGAR developers support the development of the platform? Where should they begin?


Walter: An important first step is to join the discussion about the platform. Join the Sugar developers mailing list (http://lists.sugarlabs.org) and hang out in the #sugar channel on IRC. It is a great opportunity to watch experts debating and solving problems. Many of the open tickets in our trac system (http://dev.sugarlabs.org) would make good projects for new developers. The community is happy to help mentor new contributor.

Gonzalo Chevarría:I have been researching SUGAR from their beginnings and I wanna note that the way like the children learn with that is really amazing also I realized that they increase the feel to support the acknowledgment and the education equality. I believe in a child'd smile is the best that a human been can expect—knowing  that they can learn and that they have the same opportunities. Now CIXOS-FIA wants to support the project, Do you wanna tell us a few words for the present and future people that conform our community?

Walter: The most important gift we can give the next generation is the opportunity for them to learn to learn. They will be inheriting many difficult challenges from us and we need to give them the tools to solve those problems. Learning is central to their futures and realizing their dreams.