Sugar is now available for download in a form that can autorun on a one gigabyte USB stick. If this sounds like gibberish to you then you should probably know that

The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software.

Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Available in 25 languages, Sugar’s Activities are used every school day by one-million children in more than forty countries.

Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook, Sugar runs on most computers. Sugar is free/libre and open-source software.

In other words, Sugar is the operating system (or maybe the environment) that children have to use when they are sat in front of an XO-1 laptop.

For what its worth I am vaguely dubious about the whole Sugar concept. My eight year old sits in front of her Ubuntu-powered netbook and it just works. She also uses her mother’s Windows PC with no trouble – and by no trouble I mean that she figured out how to change the desktop wallpaper with no adult help at all.

Part of me thinks that the whole project is like the doomed Initial Teaching Alphabet that was foisted on British school children for some time in the late twentieth century, and is still maintained by a dwindling band of enthusiasts who presumably also speak esperanto. According to the ITA Foundation site,

When students understand that print is speech written down, that words are made up of speech sounds, that the symbols and the speech sounds agree, they can read anything that they understand. When they know how to form the symbols, they can write anything they can say.

As they become fluent readers and writers in i.t.a., they become aware of the conventional spellings in traditional orthography.

According to me that is several unnecessary steps too many, and my (possibly erroneous) iinitial impression is that Sugar is the digital equivalent. On the other hand, it is also true that Sugar rethinks the by-now-traditional- desktop metaphor and that is no bad thing. If Sugar grew into an adult operating system that avoided “folders” and “files”, and genuinely increased user productivity and enjoyment then it would maybe avoid being a fad like ITA and Swatch Internet Time.

Ah, yes: come in Mister Negroponte, your Swatch Internet Time is up now…