Building an education ecology on serious game design and development for the One Laptop Per Child and Sugar platforms: A service learning course builds a base for peer mentoring, Cooperative Education internships and sponsored research

An initial seminar course teaching STEM Educational Game Development for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO series of laptops and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) methodologies has spawned a broad educational effort at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Students who completed the course began mentoring new students on their own time and recruiting them to continue developing the veterans' on-going game projects. The service learning aspects of the course and the high profile of the OLPC program and Sugar Labs (SL) student game projects have led to Undergraduate Research Fellowships and other sponsored research opportunities. This paper will describe the evolution of the curriculum, the game projects and related efforts that have emerged from it with the goal of reaching an audience interested in replicating the course, its goals and/or the ecology that has emerged from it.