If you had to teach someone who had never used a computer before on how to open a word processor, write a document, save and share that document with others, how would you begin? You might show them how doing these tasks on a computer are similar to their analog counterparts. How do you teach someone to configure a wireless network and connect to the internet if the very concepts of a network or the internet are foreign? On top of that, how do you create software that encourages learning through exploration, trial, and error? This was the task set before the software developers at One Laptop per Child, and now at SugarLabs. Have they succeeded? Or has it all been a costly mistake.

To say that the technology industry moves quickly would be understated. Firms must innovate, adapt and grow, or fail. Two years ago when One Laptop per Child began shipping their XO-1 laptop, they defined an industry. People were excited not for OLPC's mission, which always seemed to be a footnote, but for a diminutive inexpensive laptop. Often, the laptop was stated to include a custom distribution of Linux called Sugar that was built to help kids learn. But Sugar is more than just a Linux distro.

Sugar is actually two different things. Consider this analogy: When we use a computer running Microsoft Windows, we think of the entire experience to be that of 'Windows'. We don't make a distinction between the operating system and the user interface elements, even though Microsoft's UI has a name: Aero. This concept is reversed with the XO laptops. The operating system is based on Fedora Linux with a revolutionary user interface called Sugar. But with such tight integration between the user interface and the operating system, the distinction is blurred, and it's been causing some headaches at OLPC.

When Sugar get things right, it's a phenomenal experience. This is in thanks to well ordered and detailed human interface guidelines which help create a unified experience between applications. Moreover, it is also perhaps the biggest insight in to their thoughts on representing computing paradigms to a class of user who has little to no experience with advanced technology. This is best summarized straight out of the guidelines:

Low floor, no ceiling: this mantra should guide your development efforts for OLPC. All activities and interfaces should be designed in such a way as to be simple and intuitive to users of all age groups, nationalities, and levels of computer experience. At the same time, we don't wish to impose unnecessary limitations on the software either. Instead, we hope to create a platform suitable for all kinds of creative expression which provides a low floor to the inexperienced, but doesn't impose a ceiling upon those who are. This is a worthy goal, but will require a genuine effort on the part of developers, who must take many aspects of design into account.

These guidelines also call for an element of simplicity in the applications which serve several purposes. First, they help to lower the floor as described above, making applications simple to start using allowing for growth and exploration from there. And secondly, they help to keep the applications running smoothly and briskly on relatively underpowered hardware. Over the past few years, it's been easy for software developers to get carried away. As technology has advanced, things like memory and disk utilization have lost focus in software development because it's easier and cheaper not to. Our computers are fast enough and memory abundant enough that developers don't need to spend as much time optimizing code as they would have a decade ago. But when thrust in an environment with a 400 Mhz processor and 256 Mb of RAM, simplicity is an important mantra to cite.

Prior to powering on my XO laptop for the first time, I wasn't really prepared for the 'lightbulb' moments that were to come. I've worked in the IT field for over 12 years and have experience in most operating systems including Linux. The evolution of the user interface, regardless of the operating system, hasn't been very revolutionary. The concepts are fairly common across all distributions, whether Windows, Macintosh, or Linux. We have files, folders, windows, drop-down menus, etc. These have existed for years and popularized by the Mac in 1984. Since then, all innovation has been evolutionary, and its difficult to think of using computers any other way.

But with Sugar, suddenly there's something truly different. At first, the experience was maddening. How do I save a file? How do I configure networking? The XO doesn't ship with a manual, per se, as interacting with the laptop is part of the learning through experimentation ideas that are at the heart of Constructivism, the learning theory behind much of OLPC's mission. But each time I solved the problem, the lightbulb would go off. I began to see a new paradigm for computing, one that didn't require the methods those of us in the developed world have used for the past two decades.

For example, Sugar uses a Journal to keep track of everything you do. It's similar to the feature of the Wii where you can see every game and app you use that day on it's calendar, and how much time you spent on that game or app. Taking the concept one step further, when you save a file in Sugar, you are saving it to the Journal. If you want to work on the file again, go to the journal and click on the item. Compare this to the file and folder structure we're all used to. Files and folders aren't complicated, but they're rooted in a physical system that we've been using since file cabinets were invented, and likely before that. It's an analogy that has been created in operating systems to help make them more accessible or understandable by a non-technical person, but an analogy that would fail in a remote village in Africa who don't have much experience with the real-world counterparts.

So why hasn't Sugar taken off in the past 2 years? Fundamentally, it's been tied to the XO Laptop and the One Laptop per Child program. And that program has unfortunately been faltering in the marketplace. There have been missteps in executing the company's vision, acknowledged by it's founder, Nicholas Negroponte. These include competition by Intel in it's Classmate PC program, OLPC's ignorance as to how the targeted developing nations coordinate purchasing (they don't), and a failure to get the hardware cost to the targeted $100 price point.

In a ZDNet Asia interview, Negroponte also pointed to Sugar itself as a problem, stating:

"[T]he biggest mistake was not having Sugar run as an application "on a vanilla Linux laptop", said OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte. "Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating system. But what we did...was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management–it became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess."

But others have come to Sugar's defense. OLPC News considers Sugar as one of the defining elements of the XO laptop in the market place. And Ivan Krstić, the former Director of Security Architecture at One Laptop per Child calls out the errors of Negroponte's statements on his blog. In it he reminds us that Sugar has become the name for two different aspects of the XO: The user interface and the operating system. And problems with the XO-1, including keyboard and networking issues, aren't the result of Sugar or Fedora Linux. Krstić says, "It has a lot to do with the choice of incompetent hardware vendors that provided half-assedly built, unsupported and unsupportable components with broken closed-source firmware blobs that OLPC could neither examine nor fix." Whether these problems are addressed as OLPC continues it's efforts with the XO-1.5 and XO-2 remain to be seen.

But in May of this year, OLPC spun off the Sugar development team and SugarLabs was founded. Over the past few months, they've been nearing completion of their Sugar On a Stick project. This project allows you to download a bootable Fedora 11 image to a memory stick and boot any PC into the Sugar environment without changing anything on that PC. This removes the dependency of Sugar on the XO-1 laptop and will increase exposure to Sugar. Families looking for a safe way for their kids to play on a computer without messing up their Windows installation could easily boot their computer to Sugar. And hopefully organizations around the world who are looking for educational software for used or donated hardware can turn to SugarLabs for a lightweight software platform that is geared towards learning.

Sugar has been ambitious and it's heartening to see the developers continuing these efforts independent of OLPC. Conversely, I hope that OLPC continues to look to SugarLabs for the software that can power it's laptops. It's a partnership built out of a singular vision to bring accessible computing to children all over the world. And it's a partnership that needs to succeed. Because access to information and inspiring creativity and self expression are some of the most important values people all over the world should aspire to.

If you have experiences using Sugar or Sugar on a Stick, or would just like to discuss this article, feel free to comment below. We'd like to hear from you! GeekDad has also covered OLPC's vision and the XO-1 hardware in previous articles in this series.

Images: Laptop.org and SugarLabs.org