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

Nonsense.

[NeutronCowboy]

Unsupervised games are the rock foundation of human society. What exactly do you think toddlers, kids and teenagers do when they play cowboys and indians, marbles, crash-the-truck, imitate-mom-and-dad-in annoying-ways, spin-the-bottle or other completely random, unsupervised, goal-less games?

I agree that there's a need for goal-driven and supervised learning (whether it takes the form of games or not), but games played in a leisurely fashion, without specific goals, are just as important in the development of a child. Not only that, but they are the only way that children can actually grow on their own, unless their educator/parents are supremely gifted and know the children better than they know themselves.

Education is more than just knowing how to pour concrete. I pity the soul that thinks that it isn't.

Re:cruel and unusual

[dunng808]

This comment is funny, but it relies on a common misperception that the poor kids for whom the OLPC was created have no idea what modern urban life is like. Most of them live in or in the shadow of large modern cities, Johannisberg, Kolkata, Rio de Janeiro, Jakarta, Manila, and Mexico City, just to name a few. They have plenty of opportunities to see modern life, they just don't have much opportunity to participate.

Let me help you out with a simple analogy. You read slashdot, right? So, you have plenty of opportunities to see beautiful women, but all you get to do is watch, from a distance. That's why you bought that stick of Axe Deoderant.

Now do you understand?