http://www.openeducation.net/2008/06/03/walter-bender-discusses-sugar-labs-foundation/
In April, Professor Walter Bender resigned
from the highly publicized One Laptop Per Child project. While his
departure has caused a lot of speculation as well as commotion within
the open source community, the former One Laptop Per Child President of
software and content has simply moved forward. Bender has turned his
attention towards the launch of Sugar Labs, an organization that will
refine the development of the Sugar user interface.
Bender,
currently on sabbatical from MIT, offers the following description of
the Sugar Labs concept on his web page. Sugar Labs is “a non-profit
foundation that serves as a support base and gathering place for the
community of educators and software developers who want to extend the
Sugar platform and who have been creating Sugar-compatible
applications.”
Bender further explains, “Sugar is an educational software platform
built with the python programming language and is based on the
principles of cognitive and social constructivism.” One critical focus
of the organization is to create distributions of Sugar for multiple
hardware and open-source platforms.
The man who states simply that the best thing about MIT is the
students, has drawn praise from the open source community for stepping
down from O.L.P.C. at the time the project began working with
Microsoft. At OpenEducation.net we offer him thanks for taking some of
his time to inform our readers about the Sugar Labs project.
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