I remember playing a DOS game on my 386 computer, probably when I was about 10 years old. The game presented an unlabeled map of Europe on-screen, then proceeded to ask me to click on Portugal, Germany, Switzerland and all the other countries in a different order each time you played the game.

The game kept track of my high scores in terms of both the number of countries I got right/wrong, and also the time it took me to identify them all. I played this repeatedly, trying to beat my own records. I learned a lot about European geography this way, and it was fun. It’s similar to this online game except the game I’m thinking of had metrics to keep track of your performance and highlighted the right answer whenever you clicked on the wrong country.

This is a great example of hard fun, one of the principles of educational constructionism behind the OLPC project. As such, I’m considering writing a clone of the game for the XO laptop.

I’d love to dig out the old DOS game again, but I can’t remember what it was called! Does anyone else know of its name, or have any recollection of this game?

I’ve been back in Boston this week, and I spent some time visiting the OLPC offices in Cambridge. People aren’t joking when they talk about laptops hanging from the ceiling.

Formal testing is a big thing at the moment, so I spent some time helping out testing the upcoming release branches. I also sneaked in a few bug fixes here and there, and managed to solve some irritating interface quirks.

This was my first interaction with the laptops, and I must say, those little XO machines are incredible. I’m overly impressed on all accounts, especially with the vast level of improvement of the currently-being-finished Update.1 software release over the current stable Ship2 release. There are a number of great people there, from an interesting variety of origins – mirroring the multicultural aims of the organisation, I suppose. Many thanks to those who helped me fit in and get started.