During the olpc realness summit back in May I had the opportunity to spend some time working with the Waveplace mentors at one of the schools on St. John. While the focus of the daily 1 ½ hour afternoon sessions was eToys we did have some time to explore the basics of Sugar with the pupils. Given that I had been using Sugar for quite a bit longer than the other mentors in my group I ended up giving a handful of short introductions to Sugar at the beginning of our lessons.

Gifft Hill School Pupils

Based on that experience and other experiences I drew up the following list of "10 things you should know about Sugar" which might be helpful to other people who introduce new users to Sugar.

1. How to start and stop Activities
2. Not having too many Activities run at once
3. Journal, possibly including how to copy something to a pendrive
4. The four different Views, possibly combined with how to connect to a network
5. The two different Home Views
6. The frame
7. Toolbars concept, best with an example using a simple Activity
8. Collaboration, best with an example, e.g. Chat, Record or Write
9. Where to find more Activities
10. Know where to find more information about Sugar. (This might vary depending on your target audience but possible answers include the Help-Activity, FlossManuals.net manuals, mailing-lists, IRC channels or possibly even a single point of contact for a certain school, project, topic or region.

Please feel free to add/delete/remix the list, especially since some of the points can be merged depending on specific requirements and constraints in terms of available time, previous computer knowledge, etc. I'd also appreciate any comments, suggestions, improvements, etc. - especially from people who have done this a couple of times.

Also note that if you're interested in presenting Sugar then this entry on the Sugar Labs wiki contains a lot of useful information.