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]