Playpower.org

Simple iPhone learning games: Bookworm and Lights Off

What learning games designs are most relevant to affordable, constrained computers? What games should the Playpower project be looking at?

1. Learning games that are classics, with simple, influential designs (e.g. Math Blaster, Oregon Trail)
2. Learning games for Famiclones (e.g. Typing School, Music Board)
3. Learning games for related platforms such as the Famicom / NES (e.g. Big Bird’s Hide and Speak, Donkey Kong Jr. Math)
4. Learning games for similar architectures such as the Commodore 64 or AppleII
5. Learning games implemented on in a simple style on contemporary platforms such as Flash web apps or iPhone apps (Bookworm, SPiN, Geared)
6. Universal memorization designs (e.g. Concentration, Simon)
7. Universal simple interaction designs (e.g. Lights Out, Conway’s Life)

Which games someone feels are most relevant  depends on practical issues but also learning philosophy.

On the practical side: Could a given gave even run on a Playpower 8-bit? What is the difficulty of porting / reimplementing / reimagining the original design? On the philosophical side: What counts as a learning game? That is, what is your philosophy of learning? If, like Raph Koster, you subscribe to the very broad view that almost all games are fundamentally about learning, then the question is a categorical one (“Which games are learning games?”) but a strategic one (“Which games are best at promoting the kind of learning I think is important for this audience?”).

Your focus may be on the “three R’s”… or it may be on re-imagining “Brain Age” style cognitive-drill games… or it may be on enabling open ended learning through Logo programming or interactive cellular automata. Regardless, we are going to be assembling lists of existing concepts, designs, and products that address the potential of interactive learning on constrained computing platforms.

8-bit Learning Games: Oregon Trail, Donkey Kong Jr. Math, Typing Tutor

Below are a few lists to get started (some more relevant than others). Interestingly, there are some that show up in several different kinds of lists.

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Remember Visicalc?

Priya Ganapati of Wired Magazine just posted an awesome article on Playpower. Check it out!  She really nailed the finer points of our mission, but also presented the project as a *lot* of fun.

ETech has been a fantastic experience so far.  There is such a variety of interesting people.  For example, here’s a picture of Jeremy and I talking to Bob Frankston, who developed Visicalc.  If you weren’t around in 1979, that’s the world’s first spreadsheet program, developed on the 6502 based Apple II. It turned the home computer into a useful business tool.

He said he’ll try to find the source code for us.  That’s so awesome.

Read the Wired Article

The Infamous Famicom Modem

Playpower wants to make “the world’s most affordable home computer” more accessible to developers.  Sites like Retrozone have done a lot to make it easier for people to develop their own cartridges.  Brian Parker has even made a fine set of tutorials for programming assembly code on the NES.  But if we really want to open up development, we need to use a more accessible language.

So we’ve been playing around with cc65, an open source C compiler for 6502 chips.  This has enabled our Hangzhou friend Newsclan to produce a framework for easily making “Choose your own adventure” style games.   Unfortunately, the compiler libraries for cc65 don’t currently support all the NES hardware, but Ernesto in Argentina is making headway on that, using the NES system documentation.

If we could get cc65 to fully support the NES, we might be able to fully port the operating system Contiki, which was designed for 8-bit platforms.  Contiki offers a TCP/IP stack, with IRC, Telnet, and the world’s smallest web browser.  It has been previously been used to enable an Apple II to surf the web.

Lest you think that internet access on a famiclone is ridiculous, here’s a picture of the modem created for the Famicom back in 1988.  Over 10 million were sold in Japan, mostly for betting on horse races or trading stocks.  Here’s an article about the Famicom Communicator, hardware that is also likely in the public domain due to expired patents.

…but not always for $10.  These units were spotted in Nicauragua by Geoff Galgon, where they were briskly selling for about $25.  Notice the ridiculously scary light-gun?  Yeah, that’s what we call “pedagogically suspect.”  We’ll leave that thing out of our units, thank you very much!

The cheapest we’ve ever found 8-bit TV-computers? About $8, or 55RMB, in China (thanks Newsclan!).  All of these computers are mutually compatible with 60 pin cartridges, and all usually come with educational games and BASIC programming.

Speaking of China, Newsclan, who is leading the Playpower working group in Hangzhou, just translated our website into Mandarin- www.playpower.org/cn

Interestingly, the 8-bit TV-computer supports Mandarin Chinese text, which means it can handle just about any character set.  So, if you’d like to see the world’s most inexpensive home computer in your native language, let us know!

The Poverty Action Lab at MIT is an organization that seeks to:

“improve the effectiveness of poverty programs by providing policy makers with clear scientific results that help shape successful policies to combat poverty.”  http://www.povertyactionlab.org/

This is important, because it is rare that poverty programs are rigorously evaluated or compared.  The Poverty Action Lab is essentially about proving what works, and what doesn’t.

In 2003, J-PAL published a study about a randomized trial of computer-aided learning.  They investigated the use of computer-aided learning programs (focusing only on math skills) across 100 different schools in the city of Vadodara, India, and found that it was highly successful in improving math competency.  However, they concluded that the $1000 computers were not a cost effective way of improving education in this context.  You can read about the study here.

So, the bottom line is:  Computer-Aided Learning can be very effective.  But can we make it effective on a computer that costs less than $20?