This weekend, Olin College is providing space for a Game Jam, with the target platform: OLPC XO and the objective: create simple educational games for kids (tweens).

Tonight, I had a chance to stop by Olin College and have a peek at the OLPC XO. Cute little device.

The turn out was amazing, and the room was quite packed (75+ people?). There were a couple teams representing Flash (it has GNASH I believe) as the platform of choice, but most were planning for pygame, GTK, and even Haskell (wasn’t even sure what this was!) deployment.

I got a hands-on of the device for the time I was there. First thing to note, is it’s footprint. It’s quite tiny and thin. About half a small as a macbook if not smaller. Other thing to note is the keyboard … definitely not meant for adults! Well, maybe only for the slender fingered … aka kids. (check out the key pic below)!

While messing around the UI, myself, Scott Traylor (360Kid), and Brian Grossman (FableVision) noticed how unintuitive some of the UI was (especially the iconic representation in some menus) … takes some getting used to! For the most part though, everything can be figured out, once acquainted with the device.

Here are some photos. They are also on flickr in full.

Olin Campus

OLPC XO

What else? Battery problems.

Lots of lappies (sadly no XO’s pictured in this shot for size comparison)

Brian Grossman messes with the device

Scott Traylor figures out something on the device

Fat-Fingered, NO! Slender fingered, YES! Keyboard isn’t very “adult friendly” (but I guess that’s the whole point).

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 2:38 am and is filed under Adobe, Flash, Fun, Gadget, Games, OLPC, Olin College. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.