Sugar Labs, a nonprofit organization that builds open source educational software, has announced the official release of Sugar on a Stick, a Linux-based platform that includes a suite of child-friendly learning tools. The software is available for download and is designed to be run entirely from a USB memory stick or similar removable media.

Sugar Labs was founded last year by Walter Bender, the former software president of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Bender split from OLPC along with several other key figures following organizational changes that raised serious questions about OLPC's long-term viability and commitment to the open source philosophy. Sugar Labs has taken on the role of maintaining OLPC's Sugar learning environment and seeks to make it accessible to a significantly broader audience.

The official release of Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) is a significant milestone for the Sugar project. In this release, the platform exhibits a much higher level of refinement and maturity than the previous versions, which were shipped on OLPC's XO laptops. The user interface is smoother, the individual components seem better integrated, and many impressive new programs that have been added.

SoaS is built on top of Fedora 11, which was released earlier this month. It is distributed as a 380MB ISO file which includes the operating system and all of the software applications. The image is intended to be written to a CD or USB memory stick so that the entire platform can be booted from removable media and used on regular desktop computers without requiring installation, partitioning, or any other changes to the computer itself.

When Sugar runs from a memory stick, the user's files can be stored directly on the device. This completely portable and self-contained approach makes it possible for students to use at school and at home. It also makes it easy for schools to repurpose existing computers and get them up and running with the Sugar learning environment with minimal difficulty and investment.

"One year after its founding, Sugar Labs is delivering on its education promise for its second million learners," Bender said in a statement. "Sugar is preferred because it is a superior learning experience for young children: engaging while being affordable. Sugar on a Stick is a great way to try Sugar without touching your computer's hard disk. It is also well suited to slower, older PCs and low-powered netbooks."

Sugar Labs has received a grant to deploy the software at an elementary school in Boston. It will be shipped with a new generation of OLPC laptops that is coming later this year and will also be made available as a software update to owners of previous OLPC laptop models.

We got our first taste of Sugar on a Stick earlier this year when the first beta version was made available for testing. The 1.0 release is a lot like the beta but with additional refinement and some new software. One of the additions is a mindmapping tool called labyrinth.

The Sugar learning environment has come a long way over the past year and it appears to have considerable potential. It offers a nice mix of tools for collaboration and education that could make it a success in classrooms.