
<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><A href="http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/11/08/200234.shtml">http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/11/08/200234.shtml</A><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;">"Electronic Arts has </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16162"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">donated the original 'classic' version</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> of </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">Will Wright's</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> popular </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/olpc-simcity-06.jpg"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">SimCity</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> game to the </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.laptop.org/"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">One Laptop Per Child</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> project. SimCity is the epitome of </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory)"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">constructionist educational games</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;">, and has been widely used by educators to </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.csupomona.edu/~dnelson/cbe.html"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;">. It's also been used in the </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.futurecity.org/"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">Future City Competition</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/24"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name "</SPAN></FONT><A href="http://simcity.ea.com/community/events/will_wright_01_08_04.php"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">Micropolis</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;">", which was SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create '</SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=13017"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">frameworks and scripting environments</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> — 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 </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">Sugar user interface</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> and </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://cairographics.org/"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">Cairo rendering library</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;">. Eventually they hope to apply </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/129"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F5455">Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas</FONT></SPAN></FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"> about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#111111" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13.1px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>