The Sugar Learning Platform was originally designed to serve as the interactive software environment for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project's XO laptop. The platform offers a unique child-friendly user interface and a growing number of software applications that are intended to facilitate self-directed learning. Sugar Labs, the organization behind the project, announced this week the official release of version 0.84.

Sugar Labs, which was founded last year by former OLPC software director Walter Bender, aims to bring Sugar to a broader audience and make it more accessible to students. The OLPC project recently discontinued its direct involvement with Sugar development and has left Sugar Labs to take over the responsibility of maintaining and improving the platform. Sugar Labs seems to have gotten off to a pretty good start. The organization has improved many areas of the platform and has added several features that will make it more practical and effective in a conventional classroom environment.

"We're excited about this release, which runs on more PCs than before and has great new Activities for kids to explore together," said Bender in a statement. "As we approach the 1 millionth child 'learning to learn' with Sugar on the OLPC XO-1, we call for volunteers to join us—a challenge to educate for developers, designers, translators, and deployers."

Some of the new software programs that Sugar Labs has added to the platform include a mindmap tool for interactive diagramming and a portfolio system that will make it easier for teachers to review student progress. The Sugar Journal, a unique time-based content tracker that is used in the platform instead of a conventional hierarchical filesystem, has also received several noteworthy improvements. Bender says that it now provides better support for allowing students to modify and annotate their past work.

One of the major goals on the project's roadmap is to make it possible for users to boot and run Sugar entirely from a USB memory stick on a wide range of conventional hardware. This self-contained environment, which they call Sugar on a Stick, would reduce some of the barriers to entry for adopting Sugar. Bender hopes that volunteers will test Sugar on a Stick on various hardware configurations to help make it more robust.

The latest version of Sugar can be downloaded from the Sugar Labs website. It is supported on several mainstream Linux distributions, including Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. Sugar Labs has also published instructions that describe how to put the latest version of Sugar on an OLPC XO laptop. Users who want to help test the experimental Live USB environment can obtain the image and instructions from the Sugar Labs wiki.