http://www.openeducation.net/2008/06/03/walter-bender-discusses-sugar-labs-foundation/

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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