Wednesday 28 December 2016

Sugar Lesson Plan

Sugar Lesson Plan

Age/Level : 14-17

This lesson plan is targeted for students between age 14 to 17, so they can understand physics very well. They all must know the basic of physics.

Skills

Here, we will help learn students about basic of physics. The main skills being taught are Newtons Laws of Motion (first, second, and third law). 

Newton's First Law :

An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. This law is often called "the law of inertia".

Newton's Second Law :

Acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass (of the object being accelerated) the greater the amount of force needed (to accelerate the object). It can be mathematically written as

F = ma

where F is force acting on the particle, m is the mass of particle and a is acceleration of object (can be gravity too).

Newton's Third Law :


For every action there is an equal and opposite re-action. 

The conservation of momentum states that the combined mass times velocity or momentum of two objects should remain the same if not affected by outside forces. Therefore if one fast object hits another stationary object (neglect air resistance and other outside forces) then the other will gain momentum and the first will lose momentum but the combined momentum of the two objects will be the same as before they interacted. Therefore you get the equal reaction that newton talked about.


Note

What is Force :

force is a push or pull upon an object resulting from the object's interaction with another object. Whenever there is an interaction between two objects, there is a force upon each of the objects. When the interaction ceases, the two objects no longer experience the force. Forces only exist as a result of an interaction.

Objectives : 

Here students will learn the basic concepts of physics with the help of physics activity as mentioned above. The teacher needs to explain only once to the students, then if a child has a doubt the teacher must help. We will create a few machines to clear the basic concepts of physics.

Summary

Firstly, you will need to know how to install Sugar on by virtualization it on their existing laptop or to create a Sugar on a stick.

You can read more here :


Now, open Physics activity. 

By default, you will see tools on the toolbar like Draw tool, circle tool, triangle tool, box tool, grab, motor, pin, joint, chain...

The teacher should show students how to create objects like circle, box and using tools like polygon tool. The teacher can demonstrate students by separating them in groups, so they can discuss and learn in a more better way. Also teacher should show them how to save their activities.

Here, for example, the students will need to create three sample activities following Newton's three laws of motion. Students are free to discuss about the basic like how to create objects and else. The teacher should keep an eye on each student if they are performing well or have any doubts. 

As mentioned earlier, it would be good to form groups of students to explain them initially



In Physics activity, the value of gravity is taken as 9.0 ms^-2

Instructions :

We will make an example for each law.

At first, we will make an example based on Newton's First Law. See the video for example.



Then comes the second law, make something like this. Here when the object slides down, it gains acceleration until it comes to rest.



The third law, is about that every action has an opposite reaction. See the example video, after the ball collides with the block, the ball will slow down as it has given some energy to the block to move.






After all of the students have completed creating the following examples, the teacher must evaluate it. He/she must check that the student has got the concepts clear and the examples should work as they are stated by Newton's laws of motion. Now teacher should as questions based on this activity, to check whether they know everything or not.

Finally, the teacher should take a test, and ask them to make at least one machine based on each law. This way, students would learn better as competition always helps winning.


By the following examples, students will at least have basic idea about Newton's Laws of Motion and more.



Tuesday 13 December 2016

Top 10 Sugar Activities


1.)  Physics

Physics activity is a great way to learn physics. You can create different types of machines, like some ball-firing machine etc. In physics activity, you can see inanimate objects live. Physics is 2D and not 3D. Many people think that it is one of the best activity because it is really fun to use, the UI is understandable, and is easy-to-use. 
(Images)File:Physics blender.png
From Sugar Labs wiki (https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Physics_blender.png)

1.)  Browse

Browse is one of the most used activity on Sugar. Browse activity is a simple web browser activity, normally used on Sugar for research purposes or to get newer activities from web. Browse has the most basic features and UI and so it is very easy to use.


3.) Calculate

Calculate is yet another very simple to use activity. This activity is just a basic calculator with some advanced trigonometric function and also with inverse trigonometric functions and more. It is much used by people. 


4.) Memorize

Memorize is one of the most used activity. It is rated 5 stars. It can help improving your memory by making remembering you basic operation or you can also select based on letters and sounds. You can also select size, options like 4x4, 5x5 and 6x6 are available. 


5.) Jukebox

Jukebox is also most used activity. It is just a simple music player as it name suggests. You can select your media files and then can play it. It has the simplest music player UI and is very very easy to use.


6.) Write

Write is used by many users. It is just a basic noting pad in which you can type out text, in different formats. You can also increase or decrease font size. You can select font family, select text to be bold, italic or underlined, or can choose color. You can also add table.  How can also select heading sizes. See this image :



7.) Image Viewer

Image viewer is just a simple, basic and easy-to-use image viewer. It's functions are simple, and this activity is widely used. You can zoom in, zoom out images and also switch to full screen mode.


8.) Pippy

Pippy is an activity for writing code in python language. It is fun to use as python is pretty much an easy language. You can spend hours writing different type of codes for fun or for something important. Once the code is written, you can run it. See screenshot.


9.) Words

Searching for meaning of a word...or translation? Use Words activity. Type out any word, like "Human" and you will get translations to the selected language and also it's meaning. You can also click on that mouth button, and it will speak out the word you wrote.



10.) Record


It is a simple yet easy-to-use recording program. It UI is pretty simple and understandable. You can click on the record icon (radial icon), it will start recording and press to stop button to stop recording. Then, you will be able to see your recording in that panel at the bottom.


Suggestion for a new activity

We really need a 3D model viewer in Sugar. The activity should be capable to create 3D models, and also ability to save them and open/view them. 

Thanks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Friday 2 December 2016

Browse Activity - Sugar.

Browse Activity

Browse is a simple activity which helps surfing the internet. In other way, it is just a simple but a good web browser. Browse sports some good amount of features.

How to start Browse?

Just open that globe like looking icon, and it will launch Browse. 
(See the attached image, it is marked with blue color).


How to use it?

Now, after you opened Browse activity, things are just simple. 

You can search it just by typing URL at the text box given at the top. (See the screenshot)


You can save your current activity to journal too, just by clicking on that globe icon on the top-left corner, and pressing the 'diary' like icon. 


The settings icon in the in the above screenshot is to inspect web elements. Clicking on it will open a small pane at bottom from which you can inspect elements. You can see different types of elements, network, resources of that page, console and more. You can edit elements too.


You can undo, redo, copy and paste by interacting with the scissor icon. 


By interacting with the 'eye' icon, you can see options like to Zoom In, Zoom Out, revert to actual size and even use fullscreen mode. There is also a 'star' icon which will launch a pane at bottom if you have any favorites saved.

You can go to the homepage by clicking on the home icon on the toolbar.

Similarly, there are also navigation buttons, you can go back and forward by using them. 

The star icon, is used to bookmark a webpage. Now, after you bookmark it, you can see the 'star' icon enabled in the place where you can use features like Zoom in, out, fullscreen...


Bugs

No bugs found during this test. It seems to be stable. 


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Thursday 1 December 2016

GCI Experince 2016

Google Code-In Experience 

Hello everyone, 

This is my third year in Google Code-in competition. I am participating in Google code-in to know how an open-source community works. In these past years, I have been working with Sugar labs in GCI, and I have learned many things.

So, what is Google code-in?

 It is a pre-university contest, targeted for students ages 13 to 17. It offers a varieties of task.
 There are tasks for beginners also. There are 17 organization this time. There are 5 types  of tasks : Coding, Documentation / Training, Outreach / Research, Quality Assurance, and  User Interface. Participants also gets prizes like digital certificates, stickers, T-Shirts,  hoodies and even a trip to Google's HQ.

About Sugar Labs

Sugar labs is a learning community and also a software development company. It distributes these tools freely. It's software, Sugar, is a open-source and free desktop environment targeted to children for learning. 

Sugar is available as a Live CD and USB, installable through several Linux distros.

In these past 3 years, I have learned many things, like how to code better, problem solving, how to interact with communities, and how to fix some issues. I am willing to keep contributing to sugar labs even if I don't win. 

Sugar labs can help me, and of course younger minds in great ways. It helps students how to learn things.  


Thanks!



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.