image credit: Wired
Playpower.org is a group dedicated to Computer Aided Learning in developing countries, currently targeting $12 TV-computers already in sale throughout China, India, and South America.
Last week I went down to O’Reilly’s ETech conference to support Playpower during their presentation by playing some improvised beats off my PSP. It was a lot of fun, and on the surface it makes sense: pairing video-game-console produced music with video-game-console based learning.
But the pairing of Playpower and Starpause runs deeper than video-game aesthetic. I started producing music with a classic gray brick gameboy after I realized some new software from Sweden on homebrew carts from China could it into an electronic music workstation with four monophonic synthesizers for under $100.
In the same way, Playpower has looked at what technology is already available to the “the emerging middle class” in developing countries and connecting the dots to get quality learning games on those machines. It’s a bit like the now-expected web2 mashup but instead of tacking feeds to maps with ajax, Playpower is arming retro-enthusiast coders with Computer Aided Learning studies and slipping the results to Chinese manufacturers (who are hungry to clone and publish any content, original or not).
They’re is calling it a Market Intervention and you can follow their progress via the Playpower blog or on twitter.
Jordan Gray