Design an education game for the OLPC

by Brad Linder May 26th 2007

How do you get national governments to commit to ordering hundreds of thousands of your new low-cost computer for "educational" purposes? Put more games on it, of course.

The One Laptop Per Child Project is hosting a "game jam" in Needham, Massachusetts from June 8th through the 10th. The goal is to get small teams of game designers together to create open source games that:

Take advantage of the XO laptop's mesh networking capability
Use the built in camera
Use the XO's tablet mode (it's not a touch-screen, but there are joystick-like buttons on the side
Oh yeah, and educational games, and applications that let kids create their own games

Right now, the OLPC project has about 2.5 million orders for the XO laptop, which is a bit shy of the 3 million goal the developers had set for themselves in order to begin shipping by September. The laptops might look a bit more attractive if there's more software designed to run on them, such as games that teach young children to read or do math.

[via PC World]

Tags: negroponte, olpc, one laptop per child, OneLaptopPerChild, xo

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Rob O. said 9:37PM on 5-26-2007

Right. Not enough to vainly hope that a teacher can hold a student's focus when he has notebook PC sitting on the desk in front of him but now we're going to turn it into a glorified GameBoy? Poor teacher hasn't got a prayer...

This whole thing is a well-intentioned boondoggle. Notebook PCs aren't the key to a better life for impoverished children. It's incredibly naive to believe that the introduction of technology into the lives of children (third-world or otherwise) will somehow magically equate to a better educational environment or boost a child's learning potential.

We've certainly seen no evidence that the introduction of technology bring about miraculous educational reform for children in America. In fact, studies are beginning to indicate that computers may be a barrier to kids learning to think creatively and solve problems. Many U.S. schools that had launched programs to provide computers to students are now reconsidering because of the lack of positive impact on academic achievement.

Brian said 8:15AM on 5-27-2007

OLPC definitely is a nice concept and adding a open source games are going to be a real nice touch. Does anyone know if anyone is US (like myself) would be eligible to purchase one? =)

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