{"id":85,"date":"2007-11-10T06:38:35","date_gmt":"2007-11-10T06:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/?p=85"},"modified":"2007-11-10T06:38:35","modified_gmt":"2007-11-10T06:38:35","slug":"simcity_on_the_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/2007\/simcity_on_the_1\/","title":{"rendered":"SimCity on the OLPC laptop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update: I didn’t dig deep enough to see what was really meant concerning constructionism and SimCity – see here<\/a> – makes more sense now.<\/i>
\nGame producer Electronic Arts<\/a> has donated the original SimCity<\/a> to the OLPC project<\/a> (read more here<\/a>). A GPL’ed<\/a> open source version will soon be released under the name “Micropolis”.
\nThis is an interesting addition to the growing collection of OLPC software. I played SimCity way-back-when and enjoyed it immensely. It certainly has educational potential in areas such as civics and citizenship. However, I’m not quite sure that I agree with Slashdotter Zonk that it is “the epitome of constructionist educational games”<\/a>.
\nPapert’s constructionism<\/a> builds on Piaget, et al’s constructivism<\/a>. One of the key factors of constructivism is that knowledge is cumulative and adaptive in that it builds on previous experience and knowledge (“scaffolding”<\/a>), and let’s face it, a lot of the intended OLPC users will be children from poverty stricken areas and not the have-it-all-and-be-happy cities that SimCity promotes. While SimCity does make it possible to play the bad politician, as I recall this generally led to a chaotic unmaintainable city. In many parts of the world, this doesn’t entirely jibe with the reality that people are faced with. Quite the contrary, poverty is quite carefully maintained through the wielding of political power. So, to provide a relevant context, will it be possible to carefully engineer and maintain poverty in the OLPC version of the game?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update: I didn’t dig deep enough to see what was really meant concerning constructionism and SimCity – see here – makes more sense now. Game producer Electronic Arts has donated the original SimCity to the OLPC project (read more here). … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-education","category-icts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p22Btc-1n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.education4site.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}