GSoC 2026
Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs — Project Ideas

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Google Summer of Code 2026 Project Ideas

Git Backend for Music Blocks Part 2

Prerequisites<br>

  • Experience with Git
  • Experience with JavaScript
  • Experience with Music Blocks

Description<br>

Portfolio creation, reflection, and collaboration are important parts of the educational philosophy at Sugar Labs, and Git version control is a great way to explore all these things.

Last summer (2025), Nikhil implemented the foundation for transitioning the Music Blocks to a "git-like" version control system. His work included both backend and frontend implementations.

The goals for this summer are:

  • Smooth Transition from Planet: Fully transition existing Planet projects to the new Git backend, ensuring students retain access to their previous work.

  • Educate Students on Git: Introduce guided tutorials and interactive features within Music Blocks to help students understand version control and Git concepts.

  • Enhanced Collaboration & Reflection: Add features to encourage students to explore, fork, and contribute to peers' projects while reflecting on their own progress and learning journey.

References:

Project Length<br>

350 hours

Difficulty<br>

Hard<br>

Coding Mentors<br> Nikhil Bhatt Walter Bender<br>

Assisting Mentors<br> Devin Ulibarri Sumit Srivastava<br>

GTK4 Transition Part 1 Fructose

Prerequisites<br>

  • Experience with C
  • Experience with Python
  • Experience with GTK
  • Good understanding of Sugar Core architecture

Description<br>

GTK3, the toolkit Sugar has been built on for years, is approaching end-of-life. Meanwhile, GTK4 brings us:

  • Better performance with a modern rendering pipeline
  • Wayland support: critical for modern display servers
  • Improved accessibility out of the box
  • Future-proofing: GTK4 is where GNOME and the Linux desktop ecosystem are headed

But here's the thing: migrating isn't just about updating version numbers. It's about ensuring Sugar can run on today's hardware, today's distros, and continue being relevant for the next generation of learners.

Last summer (2025), Krish made great headway by mirgating the Sugar toolkit. That will be the basis of a number of projects this summer.

Part 1. Migrating the Fructose activity set

Project Task Checklist

Steps to start

  1. Set up the environment
  2. Pick an activity
  3. Port the activity
  4. Do extensive testing
  5. Review with your mentors

Project length<br> 350 hours

Difficulty:<br> High

Coding Mentors<br> Krish Pandya Ibiam Chihurumnaya<br>

Assisting Mentors<br> Walter Bender Juan Pablo Ugarte

GTK4 Transition Part 2 Sugar Shell

Prerequisites<br>

  • Experience with C
  • Experience with Python
  • Experience with GTK
  • Good understanding of Sugar Core architecture

Description<br>

GTK3, the toolkit Sugar has been built on for years, is approaching end-of-life. Meanwhile, GTK4 brings us:

  • Better performance with a modern rendering pipeline
  • Wayland support: critical for modern display servers
  • Improved accessibility out of the box
  • Future-proofing: GTK4 is where GNOME and the Linux desktop ecosystem are headed

But here's the thing: migrating isn't just about updating version numbers. It's about ensuring Sugar can run on today's hardware, today's distros, and continue being relevant for the next generation of learners.

Last summer (2025), Krish made great headway by mirgating the Sugar toolkit. That will be the basis of a number of projects this summer.

Part 2. Migrating the Sugar Shell -- the desktop environment itself. This includes:<br>- The frame (the iconic Sugar border)<br>- The Journal<br>- The neighborhood view<br>- Clipboard and palette systems. There's an open PR for this, so look at it and base your work off it.

Project Task Checklist

Steps to start

  1. Set up the environment - Sugar Live Build.
  2. Install sugar-toolkit-gtk4
  3. Port and test Sugar shell
  4. Do extensive testing
  5. Review with your mentors

Project length<br> 350 hours

Difficulty:<br> High

Coding Mentors<br> Krish Pandya Ibiam Chihurumnaya<br>

Assisting Mentors<br> Walter Bender Juan Pablo Ugarte

GTK4 Transition Part 3 Wayland

Prerequisites<br>

  • Experience with C
  • Experience with Python
  • Experience with GTK
  • Good understanding of Sugar Core architecture

Description<br>

GTK3, the toolkit Sugar has been built on for years, is approaching end-of-life. Meanwhile, GTK4 brings us:

  • Better performance with a modern rendering pipeline
  • Wayland support: critical for modern display servers
  • Improved accessibility out of the box
  • Future-proofing: GTK4 is where GNOME and the Linux desktop ecosystem are headed

But here's the thing: migrating isn't just about updating version numbers. It's about ensuring Sugar can run on today's hardware, today's distros, and continue being relevant for the next generation of learners.

Last summer (2025), Krish made great headway by mirgating the Sugar toolkit. That will be the basis of a number of projects thuis summer:

Part 3. Full Wayland support. Wayland is the modern display server protocol replacing X11. Wayland is not today’s problem, but today’s GTK4 work is what makes it possible later. Some GTK4 work already helps with Wayland (hello, Gtk.Popover!), but full integration requires deep work in the shell and core systems. There's an open PR for this, so look at it and base your work off it. This PR uses Casilda as a wayland compositor for Sugar.

Project Task Checklist

Steps to start

  1. Set up the environment - Sugar Live Build.
  2. Install sugar-toolkit-gtk4
  3. Port and test Sugar shell
  4. Do extensive testing
  5. Review with your mentors

Project length<br>350 hours

Difficulty:<br> High**

Coding Mentors<br> Krish Pandya Ibiam Chihurumnaya<br>

Assisting Mentors<br> Walter Bender Juan Pablo Ugarte

Sugar Activity on Demand

Prerequisites<br>

  • Experience with Python
  • Good understanding of AI model deployment
  • Experience with Sugar activities

Description<br>

Sugar Activities are the primary vehicle through which our user engage with Sugar and its various features, such as collaboration, the Journal, etc. While we offer a wide variety of Activities, there are undoubtedly gaps. While we provide support for Activity development (including a pathway from Turtle Art through Pippy to Sugar Activity) and add new Activities, we could do more to support the user community.

AI-assisted code generation has turned a corner in terms of quality, which suggests we should be asking this question: "Can we use LLMs to generate Sugar Activities on demand?" In other words, have we reached a threshold of quality in LLM-generated code where a student or teacher could describe an Activity to a model and get a fully functioning Sugar Activity in response?

You can take a look at the Hello World activity to see how a basic Sugar activity looks and works.

This idea also requires that you have a working Sugar development environment, setup a development environment will help you setup one.

Project Length<br>

350 hours

Difficulty<br>

Hard<br>

Coding Mentors<br> Walter Bender Ibiam Chihurumnaya<br>

AI Optimization

Prerequisites<br>

  • Experience with Python
  • Good understanding of AI model deployment

Description<br>

We deploy AI in many parts of Sugar, for example, in the Reflection Widget, the debugger, the Write Activity, etc. Last summer (2025), we built Sugar-AI as a backend to support a variety of models and interfaces. It is currently hosted on AWS and we have some credits available to support the further development and testing of AI services.

The goal of this project is to enable individuals and schools to use their own models. This is both to support the use of the plethora of emerging open models and to enable individuals and organizations that have access to credits to utilize them. (Sugar Labs does not have the resources to provide free AI hosting on a large scale, hence we want to enable our users to leverage any resources that they have at hand.)

Steps to start Familiarize yourself with Sugar-AI

Project length<br>150 hours

Difficulty:<br> Medium**

Coding Mentors<br> Krish Pandya Ibiam Chihurumnaya<br>

Assisting Mentors<br> Walter Bender Sumit Srivastava Om Santosh Suneri<br>

AI Reflection in the Sugar Journal

Prerequisites<br>

  • Experience with Python
  • Experience with LLMs/Chatbots

Description<br>

While off-the-shelf Generative AI tools are great at helping a learner to create, they offer little in regard to reflecting upon those creations. But reflection is a critical (and too often overlooked) part of the Constructionist learning pedagogy. With some prompting -- something LLMs are quite good at -- we can engage the learner in a quality reflective practice. The dialog could occur when exiting any Sugar activity as part of the journaling process. Rather than just being presented with an empty form, the learner will be prompted to talk about what they did, why they did it, what they learned and what they might do next.

Last summer, Diwangshu built a reflection widget for Music Blocks. This summer, we'd like to do the same for the Sugar Journal so that AI-assisted reflection is part of the overall Sugar experience.

Specifically, we would be working toward accomplishing the following:

  • Research different approaches to reflective practice
  • Train open source LLM to generate code to prompt the learn with a multitude of these approaches to reflection
  • Develop FastApi endpoints to deploy the model.
  • Deploy this model in the Sugar Journal to be triggered whenever a project is paused or saved

Project Length<br>

350 hours

Difficulty<br>

Hard<br>

Coding Mentors<br> Walter Bender Ibiam Chihurumnaya<br>

Assisting Mentors<br> Diwangshu Kakoty Aman Naik

Music Blocks Maintenance

Prerequisites

  • Proficiency in JavaScript
  • Proficiency with CI/CD workflows
  • Familiarity with Music Blocks

Description<br>

While we are anticipating the arrival of Music Blocks v4 this summer, we still need to maintain Music Blocks v3. This is largely a matter of ensuring we have test coverage and we are keeping packages up to date.

This project is both to bring to completion the test suite that Om Santosh began last year (2025). It is also to review the packages used by Music Blocks and ensure that, whereever possible, the latest packages are being used. (Package dependency is a bit of a nightmere in Music Blocks.) The latter will require some updates to various subsections -- for example, the latest JQuery breaks the search functionality.

Project Length<br>

150 hours

Difficulty<br>

Medium<br>

Coding Mentors<br> Walter Bender Om Santosh Suneri<br>

Music Blocks Performance

Prerequisites

  • Proficiency in JavaScript
  • Proficiency with CI/CD workflows
  • Familiarity with Music Blocks

Description<br>

While we are anticipating the arrival of Music Blocks v4 this summer, we still have a large Music Blocks v3 community to support. In particular three aspects of performance are impacting our users: (1) the time needed to take to load the page; (2) lag in performance for complex projects; and (3) memory usage, especially as it impacts operations such as recursion.

While we have done some incremental work, such as deferring the loading of some package loading, a hollistic approach is needed. Google PageSpeed is a great tool to analysizing some aspects of performance and provides insights into where we can make improvements.

In addition, this project can take a data-driven approach to prioritization. This may include analyzing real-world usage patterns such as: (1) most-used blocks, (2) frequently combined blocks, (3) recursion depth, (4) project size, and (5) memory-intensive operations. These insights can help guide optimization efforts and reduce testing time by telling us areas that have the greatest impact on users. This might be done by implementing lightweight, privacy-friendly instrumentation to collect anonymous statistical data (as mentioned above).

This project is try to address the performance issues.

Project Length<br>

150 hours

Difficulty<br>

Medium<br>

Coding Mentors<br> Walter Bender Om Santosh Suneri<br>

Music Blocks Temperament

Prerequisites

  • Proficiency in JavaScript
  • Familiarity with Music Blocks
  • Familiarity with temperament and mode in music

Description

Temperament and mode in music are seemingly advanced topics in music theory, but we have an opportunity in Music Blocks to engage in these concepts at the start of a student's musical education, leading a fuller, more musically rich experience.

A simple, but compelling example is the Musical Galton Box, which drives home the power of mode using a random sequence of note progressions.

The Temperament Widget makes it possible to change and create different tuning systems within Music Blocks. While most music software geared towards beginners is restricted to 12 EDO (equal temperament or "piano tuning"), Music Blocks allows almost unlimited tuning options.

The problem is that when Music Blocks was first written, it did not accommodate this full range of temperaments. The current implementation still has some artificts that cause some tuning choices to fail under some conditions, such as generating chords or pitch stepping.

With Music Blocks v4, we built a version of "music utils" that is more robust regarding temperament. The goal of this project is to backport this code to Music Blocks v3 so that we have the full expression of temperament available.

Project Length<br>

150 hours

Difficulty<br>

Medium<br>

Coding Mentors<br> Walter Bender Devin Ulibarri<br>

Music Blocks v4

Prerequisites

  • Proficiency in TypeScript
  • Proficiency in JavaScript DOM API
  • Experience with React Functional Components and Hooks

Description

PLACEHOLDER

Project Length: 350 hours

Difficulty: Hard

Tech Stack

TypeScript 5, React 18, Sass, Storybook, Vitest, Vite

Mentors<br/> Anindya Kundu

Assisting Mentors<br/> Justin Charles<br/> Safwan Sayeed

Sugarizer Connect the Dots Activity

Prerequisites

  • Experience with Sugarizer platform and existing activities
  • Proficiency with JavaScript/HTML5 in VanillaJS or with Vue.js
  • Experience with Sugarizer activity development
  • Understanding of Sugarizer Core architecture

Project length<br> 175 hours

Difficulty: ★ ★ ☆ (medium)

Description<br> Create a new activity inspired by the classic "Connect the Dots" game. This activity will combine several modes of interaction to engage users in creative drawing, learning shapes, and strategic gameplay.

Three distinct modes will be implemented:

  • Draw mode: A very basic mode for young users. Let users create freely like in Gridpaint activity - inspired by pok pok. In shared mode, all users are drawing together on the same board like in Paint activity.
  • Number mode: The user chooses a template with numbered dots and has to connect them in the correct order - inspired by connect-the-dots-activity. In shared mode, all users compete to finish the template first like in Maze activity. It should also be possible to create and share new templates like in Calligra or Tangram activities.
  • Game mode: Strategic mode to conquer territory, each users should fill a maximum part of the screen starting from a little square in a border - inspired by paper io. If the user is alone, an AI opponent will try to beat him. In shared mode, all users compete to conquer the most territory.

First steps to starts<br>

Mentor<br> Lionel Laské

Speak-AI Multilingual Support

Prerequisites<br>

  • Experience with Python
  • Experience with Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems

Description<br>

The Speak-AI activity is an enhanced version of the classic Speak activity that uses Kokoro TTS to provide more natural-sounding voices. However, current language support is limited.

This project aims to significantly expand Speak-AI's multilingual capabilities by adding support for the most commonly used languages, with a strong emphasis on achieving high-quality, natural pronunciation. Getting pronunciation right is the top priority, as accurate and natural-sounding speech is essential for language learning and accessibility.

Project Goals:

  1. Multilingual TTS Support: Here are some of the languages that we want to add support for:

    • Spanish
    • Portuguese (Brazilian)
    • Hindi
    • French
    • Arabic
    • Swahili
    • Quechua/Aymara
    • Chinese (Mandarin)
    • Kinyarwanda
    • Gurani

  2. Pronunciation Quality: Prioritize accurate pronunciation through:

    • Extending or replacing the current G2P (Grapheme-to-Phoneme) layer to better support non-Latin scripts (Arabic, Devanagari for Hindi, Chinese characters, etc.)
    • Evaluating and potentially integrating alternative open-source TTS models that may provide better multilingual support
    • Creating a language-specific testing and evaluation framework

  3. Performance Optimization: Improve the efficiency of the TTS system through:

    • Investigating ONNX runtime integration for faster inference
    • Optimizing TTS model loading and memory usage for resource-constrained devices
    • Implementing caching strategies for commonly used phrases

  4. Community Validation: Work with native speakers from the Sugar Labs community to:

    • Test and validate pronunciation quality for each added language
    • Gather feedback
    • Iterate on improvements based on community input

Technical Approach:

The project will require research into various TTS backends and G2P systems to determine the best approach for each language family. Special attention must be paid to languages with complex phonological rules.

Steps to start:

  1. Familiarize yourself with the current Speak-AI implementation
  2. Research TTS and G2P models for target languages
  3. Implement new TTS models / G2P systems within Speak-AI

Project length<br> 90 hours

Project Size:<br> Small

Coding Mentors<br> Mebin Thattil Ibiam Chihurumnaya<br>

Assisting Mentors<br> Walter Bender Devin Ulibarri<br>

Administrative Notes

Above are a list of ideas we've planned for GSoC 2026 projects. If you have any ideas which can be useful to us, but are not in the list, we'd love to hear from you. You need not be a potential student or a mentor to suggest ideas.

Criteria for Ideas

  1. Does it fill an empty pedagogy niche in the activity set for Sugar or Sugarizer,
  2. Does it increase quality of our software products (Sugar, activities, Music Blocks, or Sugarizer),
  3. Does it not involve any project infrastructure, e.g. not another app store, web site, or developer landing page,
  4. Do we have a developer now who would be willing and able to do it if a student was not available, and who can promise to do it if a student is not selected; these are shown as a coding mentor,

Coding Mentors

For each idea, we must have offers from one or more coding mentors willing and able to assist students with coding questions.

Requirements for a coding mentor are a demonstrated coding ability in the form of contributions of code to Sugar Labs.

Mentors for a project will be assigned after proposals are received.

Assisting Mentors

For each idea, we may have offers from mentors who do not code but are willing to assist students in various other ways, such as gathering requirements, visual design, testing, and deployment; these are shown as an assisting mentor.

The only requirement for an assisting mentor is knowledge of the project.

Mentors for a project will be assigned after proposals are received.

Everyone Else

Everyone else in Sugar Labs may also be involved with these projects, through mailing lists, Wiki, and GitHub.

The difference between a mentor and everyone else, is that a mentor is obliged to respond when a student has a question, even if the answer is "I don't know." When a mentor receives a question for which the best forum is everyone else, then they are to respectively redirect the student to ask everyone else. See "Be flexible" and "When you are unsure, ask for help" in our Code of Conduct.

Suggested Issues

For some ideas, there is a list of 'Suggested issues to work on'. These may help you to get familiar with the project. The more you work on these issues, the more experienced you will be for the project. However, this is not a strict list. You should try and explore other issues as well.

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