Interview Walter Bender au SugarCamp

The first question is very simple: what is Sugar?

What is Sugar? Ummmm. Well. Sugar is a Learning Platform. Sugar is a collection of software that gives children a rich environment for learning. And it has three attributes that make it different and, I think, special.

One of them is: it's very simple. It has a very easy entrance. So even the most young children, even children as young as 2 and 3 years old can start to use Sugar. But at the same time, it has no limit to what they can do. So the children can use this simple platform to reach to very complex ideas. So they're not bound by it's simplicity but they use it's simplicity for growth.

The second attribute of Sugar is collaboration. Sugar makes it very very easy for children and teachers to work together on projects, to share ideas and, in particular, share a process of criticism of ideas. So they can be expressive with their ideas, be expressive of their knowledge and engage in a critical dialogue which is so important to learning.

The third part is reflection. Sugar maintains a record, a diary of everything you do and in that diary we store not just what you make but also how you made it. So you can go back and look at your progress and use it as a way of personal assessment. The teacher and parents can also look at this as a way of knowing where the child is making progress, where the child is struggling and work with them.

So the combination of simplicity, collaboration and reflection. That's really what Sugar is all about.

What are the intellectual roots of Sugar? What are the fathers and grand fathers in terms of concepts?

Probably, you know, the great grand-father of Sugar is John Dewey (bzg: ok). Sugar goes and plays upon (bzg: fixed) the great work of people like Maria Montessori, Paul Afraoari (?), Seymourt Pappert, Alan Kay. Um, all these peoples that have been thinking about the pedagogy, the richness of the learning experience. So Sugar is not about instruction, it's about learning. It's not about education, it's about learning. And it's well grounded in forty fifty years worth of research. It's not that we just woke up one morning and decided, "Hey we're going to write software for children" It's something that we've been living and breathing our entire lives.

And what is SugarLabs and how do you work with teachers? And is it more code oriented or just a cementing of all these ideas about education?

Well SugarLabs is a community. It's a community of people that are interested in giving children opportunity for learning and leveraging free software tools to achieve that goal. And what we've done with SugarLabs is build an international coalition of teachers, of software developers, of artists and writers, of parents, of children, all of them are interested in their own learning and the learning from others. So we bring together groups from around the world. There is a very strong group here in France, OLPC France. There are teachers that talk about how they use Sugar and give feedback to the software development community. There's software developers who are interested in, not just scratching their own itch, but helping to development tools for others, which is I think a great indication of what that community is all about. It's moral fibre. And one of our goals is to make the Sugar Community be as inclusive as possible. The Sugar community really is a learning community. And so anyone who is a learner, becomes part of that community and contributes to a collection of knowledge the community has.

And um, what distinguishes Sugar and SugarLabs' educational projects from other education ICT based on projects around the world?

Look, there are several things that distinguish Sugar. There are a lot of great ICT projects. I mean there is the Gcompris project that's here in France that Bruno has been leading. Great stuff. And what I hope will happen is that it be part of this larger platform, this larger experience. Sugar is like a sponge, it can pull in the great ideas and make those great ideas be available to more children, more people. But Sugar typically has a particular bias to it that makes it, um. We try in Sugar to provide certain affordances that will make certain types of behaviour happen that we believe are important to learning. So I like to make an analogy. The difference if I want to give a child a book. I can give a child a book as a PDF and that's really a read only format or I could give the child a book as a wiki. The difference isn't in the reading, the difference is that if I have the hope, the aspiration, that the children will not just read but also write. Not just absorb but also engage in a dialogue. The wiki format has built into it affordances that would enable that activity. Whereas a PDF doesn't do that. So with Sugar what we're trying to do is take lots of great educational ideas that are happening around the world and provide these affordances that will encourage this collaboration, this reflection, this growth.

And why free software? Are there any limitations attached to free software or just more potential? And what is the crumple zone idea that you have?

Okay. So, Sugar has to be free. It has to be free software, software libre. We don't have the right word in English really, for freedom. And the reason is because Sugar is about learning. And learning fundamentally is not about receiving ideas it's about appropriating the ideas. Putting and idea to use. You can't do that unless it's free software. And there is another aspect of free software which is an aspect of culture, that is important to learning. Free software is not just about sharing, free software is also about critiquing. It's about engaging in a critical dialogue about ideas. And that's fundamental to learning. And so without the culture of free software, the learning is not as rich. So Sugar has to be free software.

Now I'd like to make an analogy to the automotive industry. The automotive industry used to make cars which are very rigid. And when that rigid car would hit a tree, nothing could happen to the car. But all the energy, the impact would land on the passengers of the car, so they have protect the car not the passengers. But then the realize that it's actually wrong. People are more important than cars. And so they made this concept call the compo zone (?) when instead of made the car rigid, they made the car flexible so the energy would be absorb by the car. The car will fail not the people. And we try to make the same analogy with Sugar and I think, it's inherent (?) to free software as well. The idea of the compo zone (?), where we don't make everything lock down and rigid. That's an impossible goal. There always can be problems. But instead of imposing a problem on the user, on the child, on the learner we make that be an opportunity for learning. Learning involves making mistakes. And when you make a mistake, when you debugging a problem, first of all that's when you're passionate about something, we want in tape (?) about that passion. But there is also if the penalty of making a mistake is high, you surely (?) not to take risks. You surely (?) not to challenge ideas. So we make the penalty for making mistakes in Sugar very low. We make it be not hard to break. We make it easy to break but we make the penalty of making that mistake very low. So we encourage children to explore, experiment, create things. And I think that tile (?) somewhat to the culture of free software. Again car industry is not a great industry to emulate today perhaps but none or less they are some good ideas.

Sugar was originally developed for the XO from OLPC now it's available on more platforms. But that's means that Sugar was developed for developing country xxx (?), now it's available for any country?

Well, Sugar was developed for children for learning. Now the platform we developed on was the OLPC XO computer. The OLPC XO computer was targeting children in the developing word. And so naturally much of there concerns influence the design of Sugar. But Sugar who only fundamentally about people learning. And whether your from the east, the west, the north or the south, all of us, everyone of us is a teacher and learner. Everyone of us port a DNA of being human or expressive. And being human was social. And so Sugar is built on those foundations and those foundations are universal. So one of the thing we did resume at SugarLabs was because we have take this idea and let them reach beyond OLPC XO. OLPC XO is a great platform but it's only one platform. And there is many other great platform we like to be able to reach as well, there is the Gdium for example, there is the whole netbook phenomena. Believe on more so (?),the reality of the new effort by Sugar is this. This is Sugar on a USB key, a live USB Key . So with Sugar On a Stick, any computer can be a Sugar experience. So we can take an old collection of computerize (?) school and let the children run Sugar. Those children can take the Sugar experience bring at home her parent's computer, use it in a library, in an Internet Café. So suddenly Sugar becomes everywhere and the more people use Sugar, the bigger is the community, the richer is the experience for everyone.

Last question: what are the next steps, what is the mindstorm (?) for Sugar and the SugarLabs?

SugarLabs itself is a virtual community. There is no physical place for SugarLabs. We live in IRC, irc.freenode.net channel sugar. That's where we live but what we try to do with SugarLabs is build consensus around the international community, around our goals. Both our development goals and also to build a place where it can be an exchange of ideas where teachers can exchange ideas with other teachers about pedagogy, about out to put Sugar to use in a classroom, where developers can share their creation with other people. There is a lot of engineering task in the head of us but the real effort, the real work of SugarLabs is to grow the community and grow the discuss (?) in the community.

Merci.