One SimCity Per Child 253
SimHacker writes "Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition 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 X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name
"Micropolis", which was
SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create
'frameworks and scripting environments — 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 Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply
Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."
Re:Linux?!? (Score:2, Informative)
"OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins..."
Re:What's next? (Score:3, Informative)
More SimCity links (Score:5, Informative)
I ported the Mac version of SimCity to SunOS Unix running the NeWS window system about 15 years ago, writing the user interface in PostScript. And a year or so later I ported it to various versions of Unix running X-Windows, using the TCL/Tk scripting language and gui toolkit. Several years later when Linux became viable, it was fairly straightforward to port that code to Linux, and then to port that to the OLPC.
SimCity Info
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/index.html [art.net]
Video Tape Transcript of Toronto Usenix Symposium Keynote Address
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/keynote.html [art.net]
Video Tape Transcript of HyperLook SimCity Demo
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/hyperlook-demo.html [art.net]
HyperLook SimCity Demo Video
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/HyperLookDemo.mov [donhopkins.com]
Video Tape Transcript of X11 SimCity Demo
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/x11-demo.html [art.net]
X11 SimCity Demo Video
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/X11SimCityDemo.mov [donhopkins.com]
Linux SimCityNet Demo Video
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/SimCityNetDemo.mov [donhopkins.com]
Cellular Automata in SimCityNet on Unix Video
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/CellularSimCity.mov [donhopkins.com]
Unix World 1993 Review of SimCity
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-review.html [art.net]
Multi-Player SimCity for X11 Announcement
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement.html [art.net]
SimCityNet: a Cooperative Multi User City Simulation
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html [art.net]
SimCity-For-X11.gif : Screen shot of SimCity running on X11.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif [art.net]
SimCity-Indigo.gif : Multi player X11 SimCity running on an SGI Indigo.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif [art.net]
SimCity-NCD.gif : Multi player X11 SimCity running on an NCD X Terminal.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif [art.net]
SimCity-Sun.gif : Multi player X11 SimCity running on an Sun.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif [art.net]
HyperLook-SimCity.gif : SimCity HyperLook Edition. SimCity running on HyperLook, a user interface development environment for the NeWS window system.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.gif [art.net]
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html [art.net]
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/NeWS.html [art.net]
-Don
Re:Two things... (Score:3, Informative)
The screen will also do colour.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Display [wikipedia.org]
Re:Two things... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SimCity not all that constructionist... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nonsense. (Score:1, Informative)
Panda3D [panda3d.org]
Irrlicht [sourceforge.net]
Ogre3D [ogre3d.org]
Also, CitySimulation makes a free web-only version of their 3D engine.
Re:Nonsense. (Score:3, Informative)