OLPC 3-day ‘game jam’

p2pnet.net news:- Software coders are being asked to develop free, open-source educational computer games for the One Laptop Per Child XO project.

It’s offering a laptop prize for teams, “who create new games during a three-day ‘game jam’ scheduled to begin June 8 on the campus of Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts,” says the IDG News Service.

“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,” says the story.

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,” it goes on.

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said the price of the “hundred-dollar laptop” had risen to $175 and that his nonprofit effort, “is being hurt by well-funded competition from Intel’s Classmate PC, also a low-budget, power-efficient PC designed as an educational tool for children in developing countries.”

“The purpose of the game jam is getting people together to hack for a couple of days,” says IDG, quoting SJ Klein, OLPC’s director of content, as saying, “Hopefully this will be the first of many.”

Beyond creating games that teach specific tasks like counting or reading, OLPC hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games, according to OLPC’s development guidelines, adds the story.

OLPC is releasing games created at the event under the open-source GNU General Public License and plans to post them on SourceForge.