One Laptop Per Child (wiki) is asking software coders to develop free, open-source educational computer games for the XO laptop, reports PC World.
Software teams will create new games during a three-day “game jam”, from June 8-10 on the campus of Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts.
By increasing the software available for the XO, OLPC hopes to encourage governments of developing countries to order more laptops, pushing the group to its sales goal of 3 million units by May 30. OLPC had collected 2.5 million orders by late April, but needed to boost sales enough to order bulk computer parts and stick to the manufacturing schedule.
“The purpose of the game jam is getting people together to hack for a couple of days. Hopefully this will be the first of many,” said SJ Klein, OLPC’s director of content.
XO users already have their choice of certain games in a “Pygames” library of open-source applications written in the Python programming language, and the XO’s eToys application that allows children to create their own basic media and games, he said. OLPC also hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games.
In the game jam, developers could create new types of games that rely on features of the XO’s design such as mesh networking between nearby users.
“There aren’t too many games right now that take advantage of mesh style networking,” said Klein, referring to the XO’s ability to use Wi-Fi to communicate with other users up to a kilometer away. “There are networked games, sure, but they aren’t sensitive to the ability to display the presence of other users, or to pop up on the screen when they are close.”
In keeping with the group’s decision to use an open-source Linux OS in the XO computer, OLPC will release all games created at the weekend-long event under the open-source GNU General Public License, and post them on the SourceForge site.
A One Laptop tester using the 802.11s ‘mesh networking’ pre-draft in Australia’s outback achieved distances of 2km. OLPC’s director of security architecture, Ivan Krstic, said the Outback provided “close to perfect conditions”. OLPC is using the pre-draft 802.11s technology because it made the most sense for the project.
“The 802.11s pre-draft … lets us create network topologies without any configuration that work across multiple hops … so if any computer has an Internet connection, then anybody that can ‘hear’ it, who is several hops away, can share that Internet connection,” said Krstic’.
Who is the biggest Web host in open source? The answer, at least for the Mozilla Foundation, Debian GNU/Linux, Gentoo Linux, KernelTrap, Drupal, and many others is the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Related DailyWireless articles include; One Laptop: Two Views on 60 Minutes, Classroom Software Goes Mobile, Mobile Aps Worth $66 Billion, One Laptop Per Child Morphs and One Laptop + 5.8 GHz WiMAX.
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