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]

We've loaded up the recently released liveCD of Fedora Core 6 running the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) desktop, Sugar. This is a quick (4 minute) video run through of the Sugar interface, and the underpinnings that make the OLPC possible.

If you've been following the development of the One Laptop Per Child project, you know that a lot of unconventional thinking has gone into it. The goal is to help bridge the digital divide by producing low-cost, durable computers and selling them in large quantities (the minimum order is 1 million) to governments in developing nations. The hope is that the next generation of school children in those countries will grow up knowing how to use computers and having the same skill sets as children in wealthier nations.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is getting ready to roll out their line of $100 laptops for school children in developing countries in Q2 of 2007. Quanta Computer in Taiwan is the manufacturer that was brought into the project to create the low cost devices, expects that they will produce close to 10 million units in the first year of development. OLPC figured out a way to improve inexpensive black and white DVD player LCD displays, in order to keep the normally few hundred dollar feature, at a price of only $35. Software was cut out of the machines, since two thirds of software in laptops manages the other third, and supposedly they mostly do the same functions in nine different ways. The OLPC laptops will be running Linux OS, 500MHz microprocessor, and 128MB of DRAM with 500MB of flash memory usage. Unfortunately the laptops will not have a hard disk, so no downloading, but they will have four USB ports if that makes it better? So if anyone has some good deals on flash memory keys that the kids can use, I'm sure OLPC would be interested. Other than the no hard drive feature, and black and white display, sounds like this laptop initiative is really going to help these kids out with their studies, and look into what the rest of the world is like.

More pictures of the laptop after the jump...