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SimHacker writes "Will Wright's epic game Spore will be released on September 7, but now you can already download the Creature Creator and upload and share your own original creatures. The creature creator user interface is extremely easy and fun to use, thanks to its 3D direct manipulation user interface. Already more than 39,000 creatures have been uploaded to the Sporepedia, so when Spore is finally released, there will be a huge library of user created content available. It's available for Windows and Mac."
http://www.spore.com/trial

Thanks to the initiative and guidance of John Gilmore, Electronic Arts has generously 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, and by the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to fostering engineering skills, such as teamwork, communication and problem solving skills, providing interaction among students, teachers, and engineer mentors, informing the community about the multi-disciplines within the engineering profession, and inspiring 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, and apply Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7865&Itemid=2