[Toronto-dev] OLPC-Games : making the XO attractive for a young quebecois

Yves Moisan ymoisan at cooptel.qc.ca
Mon Oct 8 11:20:40 EDT 2007


Hi All,

I'll abuse this list (and the cc'ed Toronto-dev list) a bit since for 
now it's my only entry point in the OLPC project, so please redirect 
this email to whatever other OLPC list it may belong to.  This is going 
to be a somewhat lengthy post.  Please bear with me.

A bit of context first.  I heard about the OLPC first through Alan Kay's 
keynote at Europython 2006 and then through Eben Moglen's keynote at the 
Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle, thanx to video footage of those two 
events.  I remember being thrilled by the very motives of the project 
and then I was startled by the level of intelligent technology in the XO 
per se.  When I heard of the Give 1 Get 1 initiative through a recent 
slashdot post, I wrote an email to the OLPC project (some info@ address 
I believe) asking some questions about the usability of the XO for my 
son.  We live in Sherbrooke, Québec (Canada) a city of about 125 000 
souls south-east of Montréal.  Like most schoolboards in our rich 
country that can't afford to provide computers to kids, computers in 
classrooms are scarce : 4 machines for 54 pupils in the case of my 
11-year old son's classroom.  The school provides a small "lab" with 
10-15 machines, but overall access to computing facilities is hard.

So here I am, trying to sell the XO to my son.  From what I heard of 
him, all they do on their classroom computers is the odd search on the 
internet and some writing.  I haven't heard of any collaborative work or 
game playing in the classroom.  On the other hand, what he does at home 
with a computer is mostly chat -- MSN :-( -- and playing games, like so 
many kids.  So I'm looking for ways to drive some interest with him 
about the XO and I'm looking for arguments.  The fact we would give a 
computer to a child in need certainly is strong, but I also need 
practical arguments and #1 practical argument is games availability. 

I read about the XO and found out it had wireless and it's own 
radio-frequency WAN (which I gather allows kids to chat and 
collaboratively work).  Are games going to be that way too ?  Is there 
an official list of games ported to the XO ?  For a kid used to a 
windows environment, are there variations/equivalents of popular 
commercial (Windows) games available on the XO ?

I'd really like to participate in the Give 1 Get One project but at the 
same time I don't want to be the only one around with an XO since that 
would kill IMO what is the XO's biggest advantage : a collaborative 
environment (which means there's more than one machine in my area ...).  
And that brings me to a question that goes beyond this list and the 
Toronte dev list : has anybody heard of folks interested by a test 
deployment in Québec ?  Writing to my local schoolboard about free 
software is useless so there needs to be a citizen initiative to shake 
people up.  I've set up a project on OpenPlans to help organize : 
http://www.openplans.org/projects/olpc-sherbrooke so I would appreciate 
this url to be circulated around.

Thank you for forwarding this message to the appropriate recipients/lists.

Yves Moisan
Sherbrooke


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