I made a note in my ‘to do’ list to check out the results of the OLPC Physics Game Jam that took place at Cambridge, MA over two days in August. The Physics Game Jam was devoted to producing physics-based games, levels and demos for the XO. Participants broke into teams to do some fast and furious coding to test out the a new Physics engine available to the XO.
It did not disappoint. I installed Babel on my son’s XO and we had a blast building and knocking down creations in this simple, yet fun game. Even more impressive was Bridge. Bridge challenges you to Join girders-to-girders and connect to edge girders on land using a simple joint tool. You click where you would like a bolt to drop in place. Sounds easy, but is both fun and challenging. To load test the bridge, you send a train across the structure to see if it will hold. Weak bolts will change color to indicate flaws in the structure. If the structure is unsound the train will plummet into the ravine. All the sound effects were generated by the designers voices – something my son got a real kick out of. If you don’t have an XO but would like to try these out, UnEasySilence has a great tutorial outlining how to run an instance of the XO in a virtual machine.
Photo by: bcjordan