1. Imagine a virtual world!

2. The kids get to make their own characters by placing a photo of
themselves on a body

3. When online, their characters can roam around a miniaturized version
of their country, and meet other online users

4. When online, they can post their achievements towards the Millenium
Campaign: for example, take a photo of a letter they wrote to their
leaders and put it on a virtual bulletin board; these achievements
will unlock certain minigames or learning modules that they can
download for offline play/use/learning (these minigames can be
programmed by individuals and kind of plug into our larger system)

5. When online, after they have earned enough points from signing
online petitions for the Millenium Campaign, telling their friends
about it, etc, they can fly to another country, where they will
encounter other groups of kids-with-photos-as-heads; once there they
can exchange/talk about anything - to prepare for language
difficulties they will either have to communicate visually, with web
translators or by creating and exchanging a pictographic rosetta stone
of their language.

6. For the mesh network, all of these things would have to be scaled
for a local village version

7. Optional online feature: find educated volunteers, equip them with
online learning systems, and set them up with the uneducated children
users (this can be for short sessions or learning modules)

*** issues so far:
- scale: hard to implement on small-scale, may need to find partners in tech
- age range: a primary schooler is different from a secondary schooler

*** coming soon:
- storyboard of this concept (if enough interest gathers)

This idea can be considered an implementation of Harvey Smith's "Nobel Peace Prize" game concept given at GDC 2006 (I only read about it afterwards, but it is an acute description of how this concept should play out in the real world). Excerpt from Gamasutra:

"Harvey conceived Peace Bomb as a web-enhanced Nintendo DS title that had players creating social networks not unlike those in place in conventional MMO games.  The game however isn't in the social networking so much as it is in the constructive projects that it can engender.  The game is designed to spill into the real world by having flash mobs erupt out of the wheeling and dealing that happens in the virtual space.  The social networking happens not just over TCP/IP, but also over a sort of sneaknet, where people get together to do constructive projects on various levels.

Ideally, the game would create many, many little and not-so-little project groups all over the world that would plant, clean, or build spontaneously.  Peace Bomb could also leverage groups like Habitat for Humanity to build its projects around.  While Harvey didn't talk much about the lower-level game dynamic, he noted that the game would have to be incredibly fun to spread the way it should to create the needed sneaknet infrastructure.  With that size also comes meaning; "I wanted a game that affords the player a sense of higher purpose," he said."