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.

Educational Games Research has featured a number of popular lists, including:

• The Top 10 Most Influential Educational Video Games from the 1980s
• The Top 10 Free Educational Video Games
• 10 Great Sites for Finding Free Educational Games

NESguide: Educational/Children Games

The Top Educational iPhone Apps

Our collaborators at the CMU Game Research Library have been remixing some of these lists, and also building their own, such as: “Non-Educational” Educational Games

On the community forum, Noah Vawter has started looking at Commodore 64 typing tutors

…and we’re looking for more!

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

Brady Forrest introducing the "$20 Computer"

Thanks for letting Playpower start the first day of talks at ETech 09! As people walked in, 8-bit music was playing from chiptune artists around the world playing, including GOTO80, Nullsleep, Starpause, Firebrand Boy, Trash80, Paza, and minusbaby.

In case you were wondering, SF local Starpause will be playing a live set at our presentation at 4:10pm, today. He’s in the SF chiptune party crew DUTYCYCLE. The global 8-bit chiptune scene has been extremely helpful to playpower.org, and for that, we thank you.

(Thanks, Alasdair!)

TV-Computer with Chinese GUI and mouse

Millions of clones of the Nintendo Famicom are being produced every year.  These are primarily distributed to “emerging middle class” consumers throughout the developing world.  Interestingly, producing and selling these hardware clones is now legal, as the patents have expired on the Famicom.

Many of the “Famiclones” are currently marketed as educational computers (”LERRN CIMPUTERS THE FUN WAY” proclaims one box) and contain a variety of not-so-effective educational games.  I suppose the margins on a $12 computer don’t encourage much R&D in effective game-based pedagogy!  So that’s why Playpower seeks to produce new “affordable, effective and fun” learning games, and distribute them directly to the manufacturers as a “market intervention”.  In this model, there is no cost for designing hardware, getting it manufactured, or distributing it to millions of kids in the developing world–we only have to design and produce effective learning games!

Therefore, in order to build our open-source developer community, we’re teaming up with Makershed.com to sell TV-computers to potential developers in the USA– and at the same time, raise money to support The Playpower Foundation.   If there is enough demand for these in the USA, we may even be able to start shipping versions that can directly play old NES cartridges!  (the current version requires a 72-pin to 60-pin converter, which is sold separately).

The first TV-computers available in the states will be sold at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, beginning March 9, 2009.

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.

The Playpower.org Interview

KUSI interviewed us last Friday.  This is supposedly the local San Diego news channel that the movie “Anchorman” was based on.  So I didn’t have high expectations!  Nevertheless, the interview turned out to be a very concise (3 minute) explanation of the project.

Check it out!

http://www.kusi.com/news/goodmorning/40447367.html

Genuine NES Dev Cartridge

One of Playpower’s major goals is to create an open-source development kit for creating new games on the $12 TV-computer.  Currently, it is far more difficult to produce new software for the TV-computer than on, say, the iPhone.  Programming for the 6502 generally requires assembly coding, which is straightforward to learn, but is not terribly accessible.

Open-source developers have provided some great tools for this purpose, however.  Specifically, cc65.org is a community producing free C compilers for 6502-based systems (including the NES).  We’ll hopefully post some functional code this week, after testing it in our development cartridge.

Also, feel free to drop by our demo this Thursday, Feb 19, at the UC San Diego Engineering Research Expo, which is taking place on the first floor of Calit2.

I remember plugging the machine into this little TV, there at the shop (I always recommend testing your electronics in the grey-market).  In just 2 clicks of the mouse, I was at a BASIC programming prompt.  I remember thinking, “hmm, what else could be done with a $10 educational computer?”

Talking with my friends at Srishti School of Design, and then later at Calit2 and MIT’s IDDS, we agreed that the best way to make this computer as powerful as possible would be to open it up to the world as a platform for open-source learning games.  That’s why Playpower is all about content–we’re trying to build better learning games, not cheaper computers.  While an 8-bit computer is a highly constrained environment, you’d be surprised at what it can do!

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!

These books sold over 250 Million copies between 1979-1998

This quarter at UC San Diego, three electrical engineering students are working on Playpower for their senior design project.  They come into the Social Movement Laboratory at Calit2 every Tuesday and Thursday from 10am-1pm, so if you want to stop by and see some serious hardware hacking, please do!

They are working on producing a new game cartridge that will feature interactive fiction games, in the style of choose-your-own-adventure stories or (eventually) Zork. We love interactive fiction (Jeremy actually did his PhD on the subject), and believe that it is a great way to encourage kids to read.  We are creating a “framework” for these text-based games that will enable contributions from around the world to be manufactured into new cartridges, in any language!

By the way, the $10 computer currently supports Mandarin, but we’re looking for someone to try to create a tile-set to support Hindi/Marati/etc.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development unveiled here on Tuesday what has been tagged as an “ultra low-cost” computing-cum-access device that can “make wonders” in the dissemination of education to the remotest corners of India.  The Hindu

While the Times of India calls this effort “Damp Squib,” we nevertheless anticipate an explosion of ultra-low-cost computers over the next 10 years.  Playpower is currently targeting a $10 computer platform that is already available for sale, but in the future, we’d like to port our learning games to multiple platforms–including any $10 laptop, whenever it is released.  Playpower is all about content: radically affordable, effective, fun learning games. 

Additionally, Flash is necessary if you want people to be able to save their work.  Imagine writing BASIC programs, but not having a place to store it!

What’s a first step, in terms of figuring out how to build this ourselves?  Here is a useful wiki page about the issue.

Flash Memory Cartridge
http://www.retrousb.com/index.php?productID=133

Tools for NES hacking, including FLASH cartridges
http://www.retrousb.com/index.php?categoryID=86
Make a FLASH cart
http://ameba.lpt.fi/~hataarto/nes/

Playing Double Dragon in North Korea

Lev Manovich sent me this picture: a ‘computer lab’ in North Korea, where groups of children play 8-bit video games on the “MicroGenius” (a famicom clone).  The devices used by these students don’t have keyboards–but the hardware is otherwise identical to the $12 Playpower platform.

I wish I knew more about what was going on here.  This is North Korea, so I can’t exactly praise it.  However…

I love the idea of large numbers of children in a room, playing video games and using 8-bit computers.  There is immense potential for peer learning and problem solving in situations like this.  Considering that a 15 station computer lab costs only $1000 ($200 for the computers and $750 for the TVs), this is a model that could provide early computer experience to millions of children.  Look at how many children can use one computer… or chair, for that matter…!

Link

From the NES Album 'Color Caves'

Thanks to Don Miller, AKA, No-Carrier…  He’s been giving us great advice for NES programming, even though we are hoping to use as little assembly code as possible..

No-Carrier produces most excellent 8-bit visual designs, and he also coded the first album ever released for the NES: VegaVox with Alex Mauer.

It’s hard not to love the chiptunes scene..

One of the first steps in this research process is to find out how can we get some units of TVCs from the manufacturer in China to these target markets as cheaply as possible through an efficient distribution channel. We had been trying to get more information about the TVC manufacturer in China, but haven’t had any significant progress so far.

Anyone in the community has ideas on this or anyone had dealt with Chinese manufacturer in past?

Beautiful. Did you know you could program on a Nintendo?

Did you know that a keyboard was released for the Famicom?

Yep.  The year was 1984–one year before the NES was even released in America.  The primary purpose of the keyboard was to enable simple programming (The programming language was NS-HUBASIC, a variant of BASIC)

This keyboard right here is why a $12 computer exists.  So we need to know as much as possible about it!

It would be excellent to fill up this page with as much information as we can find.  Thanks!  I think it would be a good research project.  Let me know if you find anything crazy.

Amazing. Computers actually looked like this back in 1984

Anuj and Jesse have been using nBASIC to start programming Ghanaian content on the $12 computer.  I told Bob about their work, and he replied to me saying:

Games from Bob's class

I’m glad that my course materials have been helpful for you, and I hope the nbasic compiler and other tools prove to be beneficial as well (aside from their occasional bugs). Don’t hesitate to email again if you have any specific questions or design problems that you think I could help to answer.

As a side note, based your previous email, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the efficiency of nbasic’s output in most cases, and the complexity of the games it will allow you to create in any given time frame. You are of course welcome to use, abuse, change, and distribute the source code in any way you like.

Best of luck to you and your team.
-Bob

That is incredible! Do you think this community could help improve the efficacy of nBASIC?  If we could program games using such an accessible language, this would substantially reduce the time, effort, and cash required to write a game in assembly code.  If we want to promote local game production, there needs to be an easier way to program.

Thanks, Bob!

Over the past 2 days, we’ve gotten a lot of blog coverage!
Engadget, Slashdot, Digg, ZDNet, Ars Technica

However, all this coverage is reporting that we are using Apple II technology.  One blog goes so far to say:

“Apparently Apple II parts are flooding India and other developing countries and people are building make shift computers out of them.”  MacMod

That would be amazing, if it were true.  But it’s not.  At all! 

So, for the record, we are using a machine that is based on the Nintendo Famicom (known as the Nintendo Entertainment System in the U.S.), not the Apple II.  However, the 6502 chip technology of both was very similar.

Eric Lai at Computer World wrote a great article that provides more clarity about our project.  David Zeiler at the Baltimore Sun also clears this up.

Honestly, I think it was great that so much discussion took place on Slashdot, assuming that our project was based on the Apple II… Many loved the platform, but other’s suggested using C64 or a z80 instead…  All should be open hardware platforms by this point, so it’s worth considering.

Chiptune hero: Nullsleep

Here is an NPR ‘Marketplace’ radio segment about our project at IDDS.

They were quite positive, but they said:

“The team at MIT is building its computer around a Nintendo-style console, like the ones we used 20 years ago. Hopefully they’ll lose the music.”

Nope. Not a chance.

In fact, here’s some perfectly excellent 8-bit music for the NES: “Chippon,” by NullSleep

Thank you to Ashley Phillips for writing a well-researched and balanced article about our project.  Notably, she interviewed Chuck Kane (president and COO of OLPC) as well as Walter Bender (former president of OLPC software and content; current director of Sugar Labs).  I greatly respect the efforts of Laptop.org, and while we share similar goals, it’s quite clear that an updated Nintendo is a far cry from the Children’s Machine.

How do you think PLAYPOWER’s approach differs from OLPC?  What can we learn from the path-breaking work of OLPC?