Submission + - One SimCity Per Child (next-gen.biz)
SimHacker writes: "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."
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."
