One Laptop per Child Organizes Game Jam to Create Free Video Games for the World's Poorest Children.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- One Laptop per Child, a non-profit organization with the goal of providing children in developing nations with laptop computers, today announced the first Game Jam on June 8-10. The three-day event will be hosted by Olin College in Needham, Mass.

One hundred game developers, educators, authors, musicians, artists, and writers from across the United States will work round-the-clock to create open source games for education in the span of a weekend. All games created will be released under an open license and featured in the Experimental Gameplay Workshop in San Francisco, with the winning team taking home an XO laptop and free passes to the 2008 Game Developer's Conference.

Current organizers and attendees include Serious Games Initiative co-founder Ben Sawyer, OLPC's Director of Content SJ Klein, and Boston Game Jam organizer Darius Kazemi.

For more information and applications go to http://hackronym.com/olpc/gamejam.

About OLPC 

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection.

OLPC is based on constructionist theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital. The founding corporate members are Nortel Networks, Google, News Corporation, AMD, Red Hat, Brightstar, Marvell, eBay, Quanta Computer, Chi Mei and 3M.