Games for the $100 Laptop

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, the brainchild of MIT Media Lab stalwart Nicholas Negroponte, has successfully rolled out working models in recent weeks. Currently costing around $175, the idea is to mass produce the laptops until they fall below the $100 range. They are marketed as educational devices for developing countries.

 

Since they are primarily for use in developing areas, the laptops are light on energy requirements, and can operate “off the grid.” Consequently, their design has taken a minimalist approach. The XO, as the OLPC product is called, uses an inexpensive AMD chip for the CPU, Linux for the OS, AbiWord for word processing, and Gnumeric for spreadsheets.

 

Since the laptop is aimed at children, educational gaming is a priority. The OLPC team leaders understand the power of gaming for education, and are actively seeking programmers to develop educational video games that can run on the device. The Boston Globe ran an article last month detailing a “block party” of programmers who got together to whip out some code for educational gaming on the XO.

 

Game jam coordinator Mel Chua said it’s just the first of several such gatherings to produce useful software and content for the XO laptop. “We’re hoping to have music jams, movie jams, curriculum jams,” Chua said.

 

The laptops also include tools for making new software. As a result, users will be able to write their own programs tailored to specific needs. They can even hold their own game jams. Already, a group of XO users in Brazil are planning a programming spree for October.

 

Article author Hiawatha Bray indicated there are already some games out there for the XO such as Block Party, a Tetris clone. Educational media superpower Sesame Workshop is busy testing games for the XO and envisions specialized software for specific countries in which the XO is distributed.

 

The best quotes in the article came from Kent Quirk, CTO of Cognitoy LLC.

 

“Games can’t teach everything,” said Quirk, who will participate in the jam, “but they can make some kinds of learning a whole lot more palatable.”

 

[G]ames are high on the wish list, because of their potential as teaching tools. “Learning happens when you’re in this sort of pleasurable state of frustration,” said Quirk. “The best games put you in that state and keep ratcheting up the difficulty . . . games are the best platform for certain kinds of learning.”

 

References

Bray, H. (2007, June 9). Let the games begin. Boston Globe. [Online]. Available: http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/bd/Let_the_games_begin_-
_The_Boston_Globe.pdf