According to a weekend report on Ars Technica, leading game maker Electronic Arts has decided to give their pioneering game SimCity to the One Laptop per Child project for installation on every machine distributed to children in developing nations).
You probably played SimCity as a kid. Remember laying out your own city, making decisions about geography, building roads, residences, and commercial areas? You got to watch how your choices play out over months, years, and decades.
The game also reveals the importance of city planning and civic policy-making to ordinary citizens, making it likely that at least some children in developing countries could be inspired to begin a career in that field. Placement of homes, schools, hospitals, water supply, and shipping docks, for example, is a central part of the game and may shed light on children's own civic situation, as it has for students and users in "developed" countries.
Don Hopkins, who will make the game available on the machine's Sugar interface, has also suggested the game be used to teach children how to code their own games, Ars reports.
I woke up Monday to the announcement that starting September 24, the XO laptop (famous as the little laptop that could) will be made available to buyers in so-called first-world countries, in quantities less than 100,000 units. In fact, for less than $400 you can give one and receive another--an excellent solution to an age-old moral dilemma.
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(Credit:
One Laptop Per Child)
The $100 laptop project for children in emerging nations is headed toward the finish line.
The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit organization Monday announced its final beta version for the XO laptop.
Beta-4 (B4) will undergo final testing over the next few weeks, then enter mass production in October. The OLPC expects to ship 3 million XO laptops to more than three emerging nations, as part of this initial order, an OLPC spokesman said.
The OLPC has been particularly busy these past few weeks, gearing up for its final beta version, as well as striking a peace accord with Intel. Intel is joining the OLPC board and may serve as a potential supplier to the project.
Currently, AMD is supplying its Geode LX-700 chips to the XO laptop. Other components include 256MB of memory and 1GB of NAND flash, as well as a system designed to offer a fully readable display in bright sunlight, and durability to withstand water, dust clouds and a drop from as high as 5 feet.
Thursday's briefing by Nicholas Negroponte on the One Laptop Per Child initiative seems to have meant different things to different folks.
The Associated Press led with the rising price of the laptop, designed for school-age tots in developing nations ("'$100 laptop' to cost $175"), while the Reuters news agency focused on the potential for use closer to home ("U.S. schools may join inexpensive laptop project"). And The Boston Globe, for which the just-across-the-Charles-River OLPC is in part a local business story, got caught up with the laptop's sense of fun, style and mission ("It's cute, green--and may change world").
The OLPC group says software efforts remain focused on the Linux operating system, even as some of the news reports suggested a looming role for Windows. And the price, backers say, will start to drop once high-volume manufacture and distribution are a reality.
For now, the system once touted as the "$100 laptop" remains very much a work in progress, with a little something for everybody--including schoolchildren in Nigeria who are already trying out the laptops.
Blog community response:
"Got to say, still excited about this project. Last time I held a computer class in the DR, a massive power surge nearly killed me when the computer in question was powered up... These little things should be able to take the abuse, and the unstable power grids of many of these developing countries. Still cannot wait until a consumer model is released, so I can prepair a few classes on them for next time I go down."
--Slashdot user Upaut
"Microsoft clearly doesn't want to see millions of OLPC machines running Linux and has now offered an alternative."
--Hardware 2.0
"The realities of manufacturing and designing mass market products has set in, but the result is still pretty good, don't you think? I saw a prototype a few weeks ago, and they ditched the crank now too. Hopefully they keep the wireless mesh."
--GigaOm
"Negroponte does not try to compete on the market, he pushes his laptops through governments and schools on powerless students."
--TechNewLogy
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