Once upon a time, I asked some friends1 to help me to distill my thoughts on Sugar into a definition short enough to be (potentially) memorable. On the off chance that it’s still relevant, here’s what we worked out:
Sugar is a collection of affordances for action, reflection, and communication chosen for their significance to learning.
Sugar promotes action because people learn by doing.
Sugar encourages reflection because people learn by discovering and resolving confusions2.
Sugar stimulates communication because people learn from one another.
Most of the usual suspects pitched in; namely: Walter, Brian, Bernie, Asheesh, Scott, Chris, and SJ.↩︎
This linkage between reflection and confusion is inspired by John Boyd’s 1976 paper “Destruction and Creation”. References to better explanations of the learning-value of reflection are most welcome.↩︎