Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

2 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Awesome by TheGreatHegemon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember I use to enjoy that game immensely when I was younger. I almost do believe it may very well help a person to develop their thinking abilities.

  2. SimCity not all that constructionist... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A lengthy mailing list post from Alan Kaye, one of Papert's colleagues, raises the possibility that SimCity is not as constructionist as it seems at first glance:

    SimCity is similar but more pernicious. It is a black box of "soft
    somewhat arbitrary knowledge" that the children can't look at,
    question or change. For example, SC gets the players to discover that
    the way to counter rising crime is to put in more police stations.
    Most anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists
    would disagree violently. Alternate assumptions can't be tried, etc.
    This particular version of SimCity may be different, though, because it is open source. However, the children won't be able to truly experiment with it on the XO laptops until it is converted to Python, since the XO laptops don't ship with a C compiler (and children probably aren't going to pick up C easily, anyway).