Sugar Labs
We make tools that learners use to explore, discover, create, and reflect.
Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven, non-profit organization, had its origins in the One Laptop Per Child project and is has been a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy since 2008.
At Sugar Labs, we make a collection of tools (Sugar) that learners use to explore, discover, create, and reflect. We distribute these tools freely and encourage our users to appropriate them, taking ownership and responsibility for their learning.
Sugar is both a desktop and a collection of Activities. Activities, as the name implies, are Apps that involve active engagement from the learner. Activities automatically save results to a journal, where reflections are recorded. Activity instances can be shared between learners; many support real-time collaboration.
- Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration: Children can write, share books, or make music together with a single mouse-click.
- Activities, not applications: Sugar activities are applicable beyond the scope of the classroom and even Sugar itself.
- Automatic backup of Activity work; no worrying about files or folders. Sugar’s Journal makes it almost impossible to lose any data.
- The Sugar Journal records everything you do: It is a place to reflect upon and evaluate your work.
- Sugar runs on most computer hardware, including slower machines.
- Sugar is Free (Libre) Software: It is written in the Python language and easily customized.
- Sugar is documented by its users: It is easy to use and teachers worldwide have created a wealth of pedagogical materials for it.
- Sugar is largely written and maintained by its users.
- Sugarizer is a fork of Sugar available for tablets and phones.
- Turtle Blocks and Music Blocks are popular programming Apps that run in Sugar, Sugarizer, or stand-alone on the GNU/Linux desktop or in a browser.