The STEM Challenge is an annual game contest organized by E-Line Media, and sponsored by the AMD Foundation, Xbox, PBS, and the Entertainment Software Association. Â It invites students from middle school to university to design games focused on math, science, engineering and other technology.
Games can be built on most any open platform, and can be submitted from now until March 12, 2012.
Ready for vampires
Batovi Games Studio, a game development company headquartered in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, recently released a long mini-game, Super Vampire Ninja Zero, for the XO. This is the most recent game being developed in parallel for the XO and the desktop PC. Batovi has been around since 2005 and has recently begun expanding to new platforms. It is great to see their handiwork running within Sugar.
Bernie reports that SVNZ is currently a hit in Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as among ninjas. It may be the most polished XO game release since Sim City for the XO came out. Now if only their forces were combined… perhaps in Vampires Take Micropolis, Online Edition?
Update: parents and teachers are often unhappy that their children play games. No less Doom and SVNZ. I sympathize with this. I also remember how a love for games taught me how much you could do with a computer (and how that was my first impetus to program something — how awesome to be able to make something it’s fun to watch others play!). This is part of the genius of Scratch – it combines the sharable joy of games and animations with an easy learning curve for discovering algorithms and techniques.
Foodforce2 team has released a stable release of FoodForce2 activity, and has refreshed its website at www.foodforce2.com. (Aside from the delicious but lapsed Rollca Rollcats, this makes it the first Sugar activity to develop its own site!) FF2 saw a great response this summer, with close to 150 thousand downloads over 6 months after the Beta version was released in May. This game has been developed to make the children learn to apply their education to build a self-sustainable village and learn to trade and strategize in a fun way.
You are given responsibility of the village during an important wedding.