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OLPC Game Jam for an XO Laptop
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat May 26, 2007 02:50 PM
from the think-of-the-children dept.
from the think-of-the-children dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The OLPC project has announced a three-day game development jam session is scheduled to begin June 8 on the campus of Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts. 'The game jam is an opportunity for developers to create new types of games that rely on features of the XO's design such as mesh networking between nearby users, an integrated still or video camera, and a tablet mode for mobile gaming. Beyond creating games that teach specific tasks like counting or reading, OLPC hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games, according to OLPC's development guidelines.' The grand prize is a free OLPC laptop. All games created at the weekend-long event will be licensed under the GNU General Public License, and posted on the SourceForge site."
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Games: One SimCity Per Child 253 comments
SimHacker writes "Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name
"Micropolis", which was
SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create
'frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.' The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC's Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply
Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."
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Novelty item? (Score:2)
Re:Novelty item? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're taking part in this competition, chances are very good that you support the mission of the OLPC program. If you win and receive an actual unit, it just makes further development and testing for the platform that much easier for you. It's more about supporting the goal than it is about the payout (hey, isn't that what OSS is generally about?).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Novelty item? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
If you win and receive an actual unit, it just makes further development and testing for the platform that much easier for you.
The part that throws me is that they're only giving away one XO for first place. These things are supposed to be cheap, give away a bunch. Give the best entries two (to facillitate testing of mesh-dependent software.)
Re: (Score:2)
On closer reading, they have four distinct development tracks, so there might be four separate prizes. Anyone know the details?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Hrmm.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Virtual loom?
This is pretty cool (Score:2)
One, making sure that all the games developed are released under the GPL is a far cry from similar development contests by commercial companies that stipulate that all entries become the property of the sponsoring company, this should encourage people to enter.
Two, while the prize is (as far as I can tell) only for the "best" game developed, I'm sure a number of people will enter just for the fun of it, and because their work will still be available to them (see first thought) they won't be w
Sell XOs and you might get developers (Score:2)
Or hey (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Or hey (Score:5, Informative)
A little OT, but I think that the interface is generally pretty good, but at least so far in the beta builds the file-selection dialogs for opening up text & drawings are still the (absolutely atrocious) Gnome defaults that are made even worse because the limited screen real estate on OLPC means the fields are too small to even see properly. Making a simplified and OLPC-friendly file dialog would be a major improvement.
Parent
incoherent (Score:2)
That definite goes in the top 10 worst
large nintendo DS? (Score:2)
so any party game concepts that work on the DS should work on the XO i guess
Sim City (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hell yes baby!
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The Incredible Machine! (Score:5, Interesting)
Something along the SimCity games would be cool, too, i guess.
Maybe the owners of those franchises (Dynamix [?] and Maxis) could even help out a bit, for PR reasons?
Millennium Campaign Games Wiki (Score:2)
Re:I see it (Score:5, Informative)
If nothing else, as I said earlier, most sexual abuse on children is by relatives and close family friends. It isn't by "paedophiles", but is rather simply opportunistic. The people we should be worried about are those who actually are abusive, not just those who have thoughts that maybe abusive (or maybe about consensual sex for all we know).
QUOTE (http://www.nncc.org/Abuse/sex.abuse.html)
Eighty-five percent of sexual assaults on children are committed by someone the child knows and usually trusts - an immediate family member, a relative, a neighbor, or a friend of the family.
QUOTE (http://www.ocfs.state.ny.us/main/publications/Pu
In many cases reported in New York State and nationwide, children are sexually abused by people they know and trust - relatives (even parents or siblings), friends of the family, and authority figures (teachers, youth group leaders, clergy, etc.). Sexual abuse usually occurs in places where children feel comfortable or safe - at home or in the home of a family friend.
QUOTE (http://www.bbc.co.uk/parenting/your_kids/safety_
Sexual abuse is far more likely to be carried out by someone a child knows, such as a relative or friend of the family, than by a stranger. And sometimes older children abuse younger children.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Worst come to worst, they can give up their Spring Break plans and pay for the trip themselves. Which would YOU chose, a hazy week of drunken stupor and puke-filled orgies on the beach or three days with your develope
Re:Airfare? (Score:4, Insightful)
It looks like there's also a $100 registration fee, but that includes food and lodging for the event. Seems to me like they're actually working pretty hard to keep it inexpensive. There's also a scholarship [hackronym.com] to reduce the costs for students. I'm sure they'd be happy to do more, given the money--see their donation [hackronym.com] page if you know anyone that could chip in.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)