Hacking our favorite Sugar activities

Here in Croix-des-Bouquets, we have a few activity hacks that we're eager to share with the Sugar community:

• GeoQuiz Haiti - GeoQuiz for the 10 departments of Haiti


• Crikey - a sensor-centric remix of Measure (Measure/Kasiisi updated for newer versions of Sugar)


• Memorize + Sensors - a mod of the card-matching game that lets you connect the game to real-world paper posters. First described on this blog.


• Sudoku # - Peter Hewitt's activity (link) with the board's symbols turned back into numbers for math class

Coming soon:

• Add recordable audio cues to Crikey for when a sensor reaches its max or min value.


• A well-documented class making posters for Memorize with Sensors

Super-thanks to developers for making the original activities! They are great, hackable fun.

We are finding a few quirks that can slow down a class. We will spend time explaining these to students as well as giving feedback here.

Sugar
• Hold down the left [alt] when starting an activity to open with a clean slate / new instance. This helps a lot with drawing activities (Paint, Physics).
• Writing prompt appears after almost any activity. Perhaps this should only happen if I have spent a few minutes' time, created media, or shared the activity.
• System-level muted audio problem was common in our XOs. Fix is amixer sset -q PCM "unmute 90%". Tony says Nepal added the fix to the boot sequence.

Record

• When looking at a snapshot, the live view disappears when you stop moving the cursor. This makes it appear impossible to return to the live view.

Turtle Art

• Students tend to click with the arrow tip above the block. Can we change the cursor icon or increase block size for younger students?