One SimCity Per Child

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."

Comments

How about some meaningful aid for them

[olivercromwell]

I've said it before, and I will say it again, the OLPC project is a waste. It is basically to satisfy Negroponte's enormous ego: Look at me, giving away FREE computers for illiterate children! Why not take that money, and spend it in ways that will make the lives of impoverished people everywhere more meaningful. Open up some more microfinancing projects so that small busnisses can get started. Fund teacher's and nurse's colleges in the third world so that there are more people to teach a child to read and write, and more people to provide desperately needed public health services. Why not send in experienced farmers to teach the people of the third world better agricultural practices so that they may feed themselves. Oh no, that stuff ain't cool. Look at me, I'm Negroponte! I make hand powered laptops to be sent to illiterate kids in the thrid world so that MY name will last forever.

Re:Nonsense.

[Boronx]

Bullshit