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). A GPL’ed open source version will soon be released under the name “Micropolis”.
This 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”.
Papert’s constructionism builds on Piaget, et al’s constructivism. One of the key factors of constructivism is that knowledge is cumulative and adaptive in that it builds on previous experience and knowledge (“scaffolding”), 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?

The Nigerian government has finalised a plan to make 17,000 Intel Classmate PCs available to school children. The project then took some strange twists and turns regarding the operating system for the laptops to run on. A strange series of events that illustrate the growing competition for control over computing platforms in developing countries.
Initially, the plan was that these laptops would run on Mandriva Linux, as announced by French Linux distributor Mandriva. Meanwhile, it seems that the Nigerian computer provider, Technology Support Center (TSC) (note the “Our values are openness…” under “Who we are” on TSC’s webpage), decided that they would replace the Mandriva Linux system with Windows XP before distributing the laptops. Yet, they were still going to pay for the customised Mandriva distribution previously agreed to. Mandriva understandably complained and, finally, the government has stepped in and it appears that the initial plan, to have the laptops run on Mandriva Linux, will carry on, as reported in the ComputerworldUK article linked to at the beginning of this post.
Although I’ve not been able to find any explanation of what happened and why TSC was going to replace the operating system, it can’t be ignored that Microsoft has been known to employ questionable tactics when faced with the possibility that competing operating systems may be widely deployed.
In the end, I think the Linux decision is a good one. Open source solutions give developing countries far more power to adapt technology to their own needs and contexts. What’s more, the possibility to have an impact on the global ICT community is far greater with open solutions, which is something we all can benefit from.