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One SimCity Per Child

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-that's-edumacation dept.

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."

8 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Linux?!? by EvanED · · Score: 2, Informative

    I know people don't read the article, but can we at least read the summary? It says it RIGHT THERE:

    "OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins..."

  2. Re:What's next? by Stonent1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well SimCity certainly couldn't be much bloat. I ran it on a Tandy 1000 with a single disk drive and probably less than 640k.

  3. More SimCity links by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Informative

    I ported the Mac version of SimCity to SunOS Unix running the NeWS window system about 15 years ago, writing the user interface in PostScript. And a year or so later I ported it to various versions of Unix running X-Windows, using the TCL/Tk scripting language and gui toolkit. Several years later when Linux became viable, it was fairly straightforward to port that code to Linux, and then to port that to the OLPC.

    SimCity Info
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/index.html

    Video Tape Transcript of Toronto Usenix Symposium Keynote Address
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/keynote.html

    Video Tape Transcript of HyperLook SimCity Demo
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/hyperlook-demo.html
    HyperLook SimCity Demo Video
    http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/HyperLookDemo.mov

    Video Tape Transcript of X11 SimCity Demo
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/x11-demo.html
    X11 SimCity Demo Video
    http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/X11SimCityDemo.mov

    Linux SimCityNet Demo Video
    http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/SimCityNetDemo.mov

    Cellular Automata in SimCityNet on Unix Video
    http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/CellularSimCity.mov

    Unix World 1993 Review of SimCity
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-review.html

    Multi-Player SimCity for X11 Announcement
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement.html

    SimCityNet: a Cooperative Multi User City Simulation
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html

    SimCity-For-X11.gif : Screen shot of SimCity running on X11.
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif
    SimCity-Indigo.gif : Multi player X11 SimCity running on an SGI Indigo.
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif
    SimCity-NCD.gif : Multi player X11 SimCity running on an NCD X Terminal.
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif
    SimCity-Sun.gif : Multi player X11 SimCity running on an Sun.
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif
    HyperLook-SimCity.gif : SimCity HyperLook Edition. SimCity running on HyperLook, a user interface development environment for the NeWS window system.
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.gif
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html
    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/NeWS.html

    -Don

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  4. Re:Two things... by protactin · · Score: 2, Informative

    The black and white mode is generally used for reading, or for use in direct sunlight.

    The screen will also do colour.

    See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Display

  5. Re:Two things... by njfuzzy · · Score: 2, Informative

    The original SimCity was black and white. I used to play it on a Mac Plus.

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  6. Re:SimCity not all that constructionist... by Serhei · · Score: 2, Informative

    It is going to be converted into an easily hackable form. There are literally dozens of various ideas over how to modify the source floating around the mailing lists already, and most of them involve allowing the user to actually look at the underlying game mechanics.

  7. Re:Nonsense. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    There's a few 3D engines out there that are free....

    Panda3D
    Irrlicht
    Ogre3D

    Also, CitySimulation makes a free web-only version of their 3D engine.

  8. Re:Nonsense. by smallfries · · Score: 2, Informative

    What a great solid rebuttal. You really addressed his point well.

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