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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."
Is this to give the kids a virtual sense of what it's like to live in a 1st world country? "look at all of the nice luxuries you will never experience!" how about the irony of building a nuclear powerplant on a computer you have to handcrank?
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
Great, now all the kids in third world countries are going to think that western cities are subject to alien attacks if you type "cass" more than 3 times.
It helps develop their thinking abilities. After all the Maxis buildings are replaced with EA buildings, signs, logos, skyscrapers. People will instantly know whos the man.
"We're trying to raise these kids out of poverty/third world squalor and ignorance."
Maybe we should ask were the OLPC project and Simcity falls on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
Aw, don't be rude. He's a headkase.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
When I first got my copy of Sim City years ago, I was such a jerk as a mayor. I had a damn fine city. No crime, no pollution, no trash, no fires, no NOTHIN'. It was the perfect city. I always managed a surplus, and the city could keep growing and growing. My excellent management skills made sure everything was compact and efficient. I was extremely creative in my infrastructure. I was also a jerk. When I realized that I was doing TOO good of a job, I decided, "That's it. This is boring. I'm going to be a jerk." So I started putting airports right smack in the middle of residential sectors, putting a single factory in the middle of a commercial district, making roads that could easily go straight zigzag, and making huge detours when I could easily put an inter-section. I also raised taxes as high as possible without having people get too mad. The power was really, really fun. Now, do we want a world full of egotistical ten years who are jerks to those who follow them "Just 'cause." I think not!
Now the kids will have something to keep them occupied during the times they can't access the internet to download their porn. Reference: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/21/1353241
So every child in developing nations will know that door-to-door commuter rail is the only way to avoid congestion.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
This is Simcopter one, reporting heavy philanthropy.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I have a toaster that doesn't run it yet.
I you do that port, I can pay you in... um, simtoast.
Sim City is a great game - I used to play Sim City 2000 a *lot* back in the day, and still have an original Sim City 2000 CD knocking around somewhere.
:-)
However, I'd be hesitant recommending it as an educational game, as in that capacity it is essentially socialist propaganda. That of course is a consequence of the nature of the game itself; if common law replaced city planning, and services like roads, mass transit, healthcare and education were privatized, then there wouldn't be a lot for a Sim City gamer to do.
Essentially it'd boil down to administration & law & order - which are the proper functions of Government, but don't exactly make for a thrilling game
Buddy, it's *SimCity*. Hand in your Nerd Card at the door! ;p
spin-the-bottle or other completely random, unsupervised, goal-less games? Spin the bottle goal-less? You must have played differently than me...
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Once the dust settles, I'd love to port SimCity to the TomTom GPS navigator device. TomToms run Linux, of course, so it won't be very difficult.
Then you could operate the bulldozer by driving your car around! It would be safest to play it in the desert, so you didn't run into any real buildings.
Disclaimer: I work for TomTom, and we're looking for some great Linux hackers! It's a great company to work for. Please send me email if you know Linux well, want to live in Amsterdam, and hack Linux on TomTom GPS navigation devices!
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
So what you're saying is that you're american.. we get it.
How we know is more important than what we know.