Sugar on a Stick learning platform beta released

Sugar Labs, the maker of the software for the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, has announced the release of a first beta of Sugar on a Stick. Sugar on a Stick is a version of the free open source Sugar Learning Platform that can be installed to, and booted from, a USB flash drive on a conventional desktop, notebook or netbook computer. Walter Bender, Executive Director of Sugar Labs says "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,".

The Sugar Learning Platform is a child-friendly operating system that includes several collaborative applications, which Sugar calls "activities", and is used as a native environment on the XO-1 laptop. Activities include Write, a shared word processor and InfoSlicer, which allows "teachers to easily collect and package web-based content for the classroom." According to Sugar Labs, the Sugar computer environment is already being used by about one million students aged five to twelve years old, in over 40 countries and is available in 26 languages.

Sugar on a Stick requires a Windows or Linux system to transfer the image to a USB flash drive that is at least 1 GB in size. More details about the release can be found in the release notes. Sugar on a Stick is available to download (Direct Download of ISO image) under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

See also:

• New version of the XO software released, a report from The H.
• Sugar Labs joins the Software Freedom Conservancy, a report from The H.

(crve)