EA Donates Original SimCity to One Laptop Per Child

Today Electronic Arts Inc. announced the company will donate the original SimCity™ — the blockbuster 1989 game credited with giving rise to the city-building game genre—to each computer in the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative. OLPC is a not-for-profit humanitarian effort to design, manufacture and distribute inexpensive laptops with the goal of giving every child in the world access to modern education. By gifting SimCity onto each OLPC laptop, EA is providing users with an entertaining way to engage with computers as well as help develop decision-making skills while honing creativity. This is the first time a major video game publisher has gifted a game to the world.

OLPC will begin distributing laptops in countries such as Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Haiti, Cambodia and India by the end of 2007. The idea to connect SimCity with OLPC came from internet pioneer, activist and OLPC advisor John Gilmore who knew the game’s history and recognized its potential relevance to the not-for-profit project. Not long after its 1989 release, SimCity became a phenomenon, winning more than 24 domestic and international awards. The game soon made its way into more than 10,000 classrooms as an educational tool and became part of the annual Future City Competition, a contest that still runs in seventh and eighth grade classrooms today.

Source: neowin

The $100 laptop is now the $188 laptop

Leaders of the non-profit One Laptop Per Child that was spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology have acknowledged that the devices are now slated to cost $188 when mass production begins this fall. The last announced price was $176 and $100 was touted as a long-term goal. Spokesman George Snell blamed the latest increase on a variety of factors, including currency fluctuations and rising costs of such components as nickel and silicon. He said the project was committed to keeping the price from rising above $190. The laptops are being made by Taiwan's Quanta Computer Incorporated, the world's leading manufacturer of portable computers.

One Laptop Per Child says it has commitments for at least 3 million of its rugged "XO" computers; among the nations that have shown interest are Brazil, Libya, Thailand and Uruguay. While less than $200 for an innovative, wireless-enabled, hand-powered laptop is a relative bargain, a price nearly twice than what was promised could make it harder for OLPC to sign up international governments as customers. Those governments are expected to give the computers to children for them to keep and tinker with, which the project's founders believe will cause critical thinking and creativity to blossom.

Krazzer (a member of neowin.net forums) posted a very valid comment on this post at neowin.net that I would like to include in this post:

"Or you could go to any of these major laptop sellers and pay at most $200 more and get a computer that can actually handle todays software.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Se...&CatId=1905
http://www.usanotebook.com/computer_laptop...ale2.php?id=169http://www.laptopoutlet.com/tote80lapii3.html
http://www.laptopoutlet.com/dein70lapii31.html

Sure $200 might be a ton of money to some of these familes but why not save up another $200 and get a computer that the whole family can use, and actually has potential to teach them something that could get them a real job.And of course some people may not have electricity so the hand crank is pretty much the only option.Frankly, I think these computers are going to hurt more than they help, but time will tell.

Source : CNN and Neowin