Map and Activity news from Haiti

Update: The US Embassy recently visited Ecole Shalom and its OLPC deployment, with a donation of creole books, and blogged about it in English and French.

Nick Doiron recently travelled to Petit-Goave, Haiti,  continuing to map the country there via OpenStreetMap.

He has also been hacking on activities for the OLPC schools there, most recently the Bridge activity originally from Daniel Drake and Nirav Patel — adding a plugin which lets you incorporate a solar sensor, which lets sunlight grow giant flowers that push up your bridge!

If you think this sounds like a daydream morphed into activity form, you’re absolutely right.  (see screenshots below).

Nick: if you’re looking at games to add solar sensing to, then Rollcats is an obvious choice.  The Sun is your cheerleader!

 

FoodForce2 update: facelift and new website

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.

You are given responsibility of the village during an important wedding.

The team welcomes your feedback and would like to encourage you to give the game a try. The new release has lots of improvements, with an improved story and interface, better save/resume, customizable building placement, and the fantastic panoramic photographs from its earlier versions.  Details after the jump.