Sugar Labs

What makes Sugar different?

Sugar facilitates sharing and collaboration: children can write articles, share books, or make music together with a single mouse-click.
Activities, not applications: Sugar activities are applicable beyond the scope of the classroom and even Sugar itself.
Automatic backup of Activity work; no worrying about files or folders. Sugar’s Journal makes it almost impossible to lose any data.
The Journal records everything you do: it is a place to reflect upon and evaluate your work.
Sugar runs on most computer hardware, including slower machines.
Sugar is Free (Libre) Software: it is written in the Python language and easily customized.
Sugar is documented by its users: it is easy to use, and teachers worldwide have created a wealth of pedagogical materials for it.
Sugar is written by its users: 50% of the updates to our latest release came directly from our users.

Hundreds of tools for discovery through exploring, expressing, and sharing through online research, writing, coding, and more.
Built-in collaboration system: peer-to-peer learning; always-on support; and single-click sharing.
A built-in portfolio assessment tool called Journal that serves as a forum for discussion between children, parents, and teachers.
A discoverable learning platform: it uses simple means to reach to complex ends.
Designed for local appropriation: Sugar has built-in tools for making changes and improvements and a growing global community of support. twenty-five languages are currently available.
An emphasis on learning through doing and debugging: this engages learners better to tackle authentic problems.
Available in a wide variety of forms: as part of GNU/Linux distributions, as well as LiveCD, LiveUSB, and in a virtual machine for Windows and Mac machines.

Pedagogical framework centered around Constructionism learning and founded on student empowerment
Collaboration and journaling features, uniquely designed by educators for educators and learners
Hundreds of activities
Large and committed community of developers, teachers, and learners from all around the globe
24/7 community support
Online and in-person training and workshops available
Handouts available to use in the classroom
Teacher-driven development, rapidly expanding every day
Easily localizable and customizable
Free/Libre software: no licensing fees
A global project: no single point of dependency or failure

At Sugar Labs, we strive for a learning-centric approach, where teachers mentor students as they engage with powerful ideas, or instructing less and learning more. At Sugar Labs, we give children access to knowledge—through media such as electronic books, the world-wide web, and multimedia—but, more importantly, we give them the tools they need to create, to learn about learning, to put knowledge to use, and engage in reflection and critical dialog. With Sugar, we help learners acquire knowledge so that they grow as active consumers, critics, and creators of knowledge; Sugar welcomes them as members of a vibrant learning community. Plus, cross-community collaboration between technologists and teachers ensures that the ideals of student empowerment, freedom, sharing, open critique, and transparency will remain an integral part of Sugar—one that touches the lives of children and their communities all across the world’s classrooms.

The Sugar pedagogy is embodied in the culture of Free/Libre Software; teachers and students are empowered with both the freedom to actively participate and the freedom to be critical. Criticism of ideas is a powerful force in learning, as well as in fostering economic development; unleashing this potential is an important part of our mission.