Super Vampire Ninja lands on the XO

Ready for vampires

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.

2010 Internships open in Rwanda, Paraguay, Peru, Nicaragua

The OLPC Association is pleased to announce new internship opportunities for the coming year.  Country support interns will support an established deployment for 3 to 12 months, in one of four countries: Rwanda, Paraguay, Peru, or Nicaragua.


Learning outside in Peru

Learning outside with an intern teaching assistant in 2009


Support interns serve a vital role in building local capacity of partnering countries and organizations.  Innovators in business, engineering, social sciences, computer science, and public relations will be paired with experts in local knowledge and community building.  Teams will work alongside local school children, teachers, community members, and government officials to accelerate each country toward their long-term goals for education development.   Projects range from technical infrastructure support and local software design to advocacy and classroom assistance.  Internships are open to students over the age of 18.

There are also internship opportunities in grant writing and foundation outreach.  These interns will work remotely, conducting research and working with country deployments to formulate and submit grant proposals.  These are unpaid internships, with possible opportunities to travel to partnering countries.

Apply for an internship online, or find out more about the program.

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