OLPC Project Wants More Games on XO

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project that promises to deliver laptops for school children in developing countries, is now inviting software coders to develop free, open-source educational computer games for the XO laptop.

Founder, Negroponte’s team is holding special three day ‘game-jam’ sessions for software teams to encourage them to participate in developing games for this system. The OLPC team is hoping for support from more governments for their project, by developing more software for their platform.

XO laptops, which are being specially developed by the OLPC project, already have a list of certain games in a ‘ Pygames library ’ of open-source applications and the XO’s eToys application that allows children to create their own basic media and games. Now, with these game jam sessions, OLPC is seeking to offer new types of games that rely on features such as mesh networking between nearby users, an integrated still or video camera, and a tablet mode for mobile gaming.

Moreover, OLPC hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games. The project 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 .