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Educational Games for OLPC

Project URL: http://www.squeaksource.com/UIUC4OLPC.html


I recently came across an article in PC World online entitled "OLPC Seeks Educational Games for XO Laptop" Link.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative does include the Etoys distribution Site, and by using Method 1 we could contribute.

I have contacted a representative of OLPC's Etoys distribution, and they state:

"The way game distribution works is that you make it publicly available online (OLPC can provide project hosting http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Project_hosting once you have some working code) and the children will download it from your (or our) website. If you let us know when the game is finished we can help you list it in our content library (currently under construction) so it becomes part of the XO software ecosystem."

If interested, please post your name below and contact me so we can begin thinking about game ideas and implementation ASAP.

Thanks,
Shayne


May 31, 2007- An update from the Etoys OLPC mailing list:

"Can you think of your game be one of the "ExampleEtoys" projects? Each of these projects is on the disk (or somewhere on the network) as a separated file, and loaded when the user select it from the file dialog. That might be a good match for what you would like to do."

It seems like it is very doable and I think they would appreciate some help in this process.

Elkin Florez June 1, 2007 - I like this idea. I think games are wonderful tools for practicing design. Some times they are very challenging. And off course, the OLPC give us one exiting extra point. Our product will be part of a wonderful project.

Shayne Czyzewski June 1, 2007 - Now that we have enough interest, perhaps everyone could take this weekend to brainstorm an idea or two they would like the group to consider implementing, and we could set up a group chat or just email chains to discuss this early next week? -Shayne

Ralph Johnson - EToys is not Squeak, it is a system built on top of Squeak. EToys is implemented in Smalltalk, but it is essentially its own language. EToys is a fairly limited language, since it is designed to be used by fourth graders. You need to learn it before you can predict what it can do, because it is good at somethings and bad at others. You wouldn't want to make a check game with it, for example. You might make a pinball game, though.

Since EToys is implemented in Squeak, all OLPC machines will have Squeak, but they don't advertise it or expect children to know about it. You might be able to write a game in Squeak anyway, but you wouldn't win the EToys prize if you did that.

Doing something for OLPC is great! Give it a try. You will run into roadblocks, but that is true of anything worth doing.

Shayne Czyzewski July 6, 2007 - For those who had emailed me recently about joining, our group is unfortunately full. However, feel free to start a new group under the same cause!


Group Member List

  1. Shayne Czyzewski
  2. James Shepherd
  3. Elkin Florez
  4. Jeffrey Votteler

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