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

Awesome

[TheGreatHegemon]

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.

cruel and unusual

[stormguard2099]

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?

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?

Great...

[pwnies]

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.

Too Late...

[p0tat03]

I see I'm too late to beat our cynical Slashdotters to the punch. Instead of complaining about how evil EA is, and what kind of ulterior motives they may have, can we simply not recognize this as a net Good Thing? I know I learned a lot of planning for the future, fiscal management, and balancing multiple (sometimes conflicting) priorities while still achieving overall success, from that game as a child. Technical issues aside from making the game run, this will be a great gain for OLPC users.

Do we want a world full of jerks?

[Debello]

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!

Re:Do we want a world full of jerks?

[lgw]

Wait, wait, when did you become the mayor of San Jose?

EA Not Being Evil for a Change

[hardburn]

Of late, it seems that EA is cleaning itself up. I between screwing up C&C: Generals (a patch for the expansion left the game in a broken state for a few years), employee mistreatment, and generally writing mostly shovelware franchise titles like Madden, I had been boycotting them. But now I think they deserve another chance because:

1. Spore
2. Give away the original C&C
3. Made a C&C game that actually has a story connected to the rest of the C&C games
4. One of the first developers to realize the Wii had potential

So while I'm still keeping a close eye on them, they've at least convinced me that their games are worth buying.

SimCity not all that constructionist...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:SimCity not all that constructionist...

[MrNonchalant]

Most anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists would disagree violently.

So the way to counter rising crime is to lock up all the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists?

More SimCity links

[SimHacker]

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

Re:More SimCity links

[Sponge Bath]

I have a toaster that doesn't run it yet.
I you do that port, I can pay you in... um, simtoast.

Re:not much of a donation

[SimHacker]

SimCity isn't abandonware, and even if it were, you couldn't distribute or run it on the OLPC, for technical and legal reasons. The point is to extend and adapt the open source code for the needs of education, not just run the old version under an emulator.

-Don

Rails not roads

[cvd6262]

So every child in developing nations will know that door-to-door commuter rail is the only way to avoid congestion.

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:Nonsense.

[benna]

The dirty little secret is that the "goal-driven real world" is just another game that a lot of adults happen to play.

Re:Nonsense.

[ADRenalyn]

Funny that someone here has linked to my companies site...

Our original goal at CitySimulation was to do what Google is doing now- build every major city in the U.S. in a real-time virtual environment. Our models are not built as quickly and easily (Google has airplanes with laser scanners, vans with mounted cameras, and high-tech GPS photo mapping software), but since every square inch of our models are 'hand-crafted', they are a lot more accurate, and of higher quality.

Since we never got any investors to buy into the idea, we had to rely on doing developer projects, one building at a time. It' a nice use of real-time technology... A developer has a challenge of convincing the city council that their proposed building will fit within the context of the site and its surroundings. With an interactive model (like a video game), many questions about a design can be answered in one meeting.

Anyway, we're now moving on to areas that Google and Microsoft are not (yet) interested in- proposed buildings/renovations, and building interiors. It's fun work, as close to creating video games that I'll probably ever get to be.

Re:Tag as SLASHVERTISEMENT

[Fallingcow]

I've learned TONS of things from games and other diversions on the PC.

Mavis Beacon (explicitly educational) taught me proper typing, but chatting with my friends on AIM and (especially) busy IRC channels taught me to type FAST.

Shadow President is the reason I can locate practically any country on a map faster than the vast majority of people.

A lot of stuff in my political science classes (and my own readings on philosophy in general) reminded me of ideas and people in Deus Ex.

Medieval: Total War taught me more about medieval political geography, politics, and technology (war-related tech, that is) than I was ever taught in any level of my education (yeah, I know more from reading, but no class ever taught me this stuff; we always skipped from talking about the Fertile Crescent to covering the Age of Exploration. Seriously.)

Rome: Total War and a couple of its mods (Rome: Total Realism and Europa Barbarorum, especially) have taught me a TON about the Hellenistic and Roman periods of history. Thanks to them, I know BOTH the Koine or Attic Greek AND Latin names for tons of Mediterranean cities (though I often don't know the modern name!)

Bushido Blade 1 & 2 and Shogun: Total War taught me the names of a bunch of different Japanese weapons.

I know a bit about the operation of a variety of firearms that I've never physically used, from paying close attention to the reload animations in dozens of games over the years (Counter-Strike and most WWII shooters are GREAT for this).

OK, so a lot of it's not *useful* information, but I did learn :)