OLPC Game Jam for an XO Laptop

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."

Comments

Re:Novelty item?

[gEvil (beta)]

How likely does the grand prize winner(s) need an OLPC laptop?

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?).

Re:Novelty item?

[LiquidCoooled]

I do quite a bit of development for my PDA and whilst I have an emulator environment for it whilst developing, nothing says "usability test" better than putting it on the device and going sitting away from a real pc with a mouse.