IXL Social Enterprise Case Studies Education January 2012 | Page 4

Revolutionizing the way to make education affordable for everyone
The Sugar software platform allowed children to
explore, create and share with each other
In 2007, Red Hat contributed a compact version
of its Linux-based Fedora operating system which
was used to build Sugar.10 Red Hat and OLPC
software engineers, together with help from the
open source community, developed the software.
Linux and Sugar required less disk space than
other operating systems—it can run on a 2GB
USB flash drive11 (See table 1 for specifications).
The XO GUI was specifically designed to be
intuitive to children. Rather than the typical
subject/folder organization of Windows OS, the
XO GUI was chronologically organized like a
journal, where users could more easily find the
work they had done on Monday or Wednesday,
for example.12
All of the programs or “applications” in Sugar are
based on Constructionism theories developed by
Seymour Papert. This means that all applications,
activated under the “Activities” menu, are
designed so that children learn by exploring and
expressing, rather than memorizing concepts.13
The XO ships with a default set of applications
such as TamTamEdit, Chat, Record and Pippy.14
TamTamEdit allows kids to compose music by
creating, organizing and modifying notes into
tunes which they can then play back and share.
Chat allows the kids to talk to each other, either in
pairs or to the whole classroom. Record provides
a way to save multimedia content—pictures,
audio, video—that can also be shared with

others. Pippy introduces the kids to programming
in Python, the language Sugar was built on.
Because Sugar and all the other software are
open-source, children and others are free to
modify current applications as well as create new
ones. This setup has spurred the creation of a
community of developers (mostly children) who
share new activities and games for others in the
world to use.
Currently, development of Sugar is continued at
Sugar Labs and led by Walter Bender, OLPC cofounder and creator of Sugar. Sugar runs not only
on the XO laptops but also on other PCs as well.15
Each laptop was customized by language and
local cultural content
In every deployment, OLPC can pre-load local
content beyond the laptop’s default content
distribution. The specific localized content,
defined by the customer, includes additional
activities, electronic books, texts, music, Internet
browser bookmarks, maps, dictionaries and
language translations.18
For example, OLPC Canada adds eight additional
activities and around 100 electronic books, some
written by aboriginal authors,19 targeted towards
aboriginal youth.20 In Afghanistan, the