one sim city per child
SimCity on an OLPC to help kids understand cities. What's not to love?
This one via Slashdot
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."
6 comments:
did i read that right, an open source SIM City version? nice!
i remember having a sprawling nondescript 21st-century city earning a couple of millions. could be better but not bad for an amateur. too bad i don't have the game in my current laptop anymore.
simcity got me into urban planning.
but i did tire of the game in the later releases (anything older than simcity 2000) -the graphics were better but the city dynamics got screwed up.
i really liked the way you could tinker with the tax system on a per category basis in simcity 2000.
and, harking back to the ecoblocks post, did you hear about the simcity societies module that adds energy choices and global warming into the mix?
Wow another one so soon you're on a roll!
walang kokontra!
let's not jinx it.
(hehehe)
if only all politicians are required to finish a simcity classic game with a required score level, we'll have better urban planning in the philippines.
nice blog, im adding you to my rss reader.
thanks, marky.
will add your blog to my roll, too.
btw, did you know that Mayor Jesse Robredo requires all Naga City Hall employees to play SimCity?
UDC
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