Don Hopkins is an

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...

and

programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics. He is an alumnus of the University of Maryland and a former member of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab. He inspired Richard Stallman, who described him as a "very imaginative fellow", to use the term copyleft. He coined Deep Crack as the name of the EFF DES cracker. He ported the '' SimCity'' computer game to several versions of Unix and developed a multi player version of ''SimCity'' for X11, did much of the core programming of '' The Sims'', and developed robot control and personality simulation software for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club. He developed and refined pie menus for many platforms and applications including window managers,

Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

, ''SimCity'' and ''The Sims'', and published a frequently cited paper about pie menus at CHI'88 with John Raymond Callahan, Ben Shneiderman and Mark Weiser. He has published many free software and

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

implementations of pie menus for X10, X11,

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...

, Tcl/tk, ScriptX, ActiveX, JavaScript,

OpenLaszlo OpenLaszlo is a discontinued open-source platform for the development and delivery of rich web applications. It is released under the Open Source Initiative certified Common Public License (CPL). The OpenLaszlo platform consists of the LZX pro ...

, Python and OLPC, and also proprietary implementations for ''The Sims'' and the Palm Pilot. Hopkins also wrote demonstrations and programming examples of the ScriptX multimedia scripting language created by the Apple/IBM research spinoff Kaleida Labs, developed various

applications and components, and is a

hacker artist The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to ...

known for his artistic cellular automata. He is also known for having written a chapter "The X-Windows Disaster" on X Window System in the book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.

Micropolis

Hopkins, supported by John Gilmore, adapted ''SimCity'' for the OLPC

XO-1 laptop The OLPC XO (formerly known as $100 Laptop, Children's Machine, 2B1) is a low cost laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with Access to Knowledge movement, access to know ...

. The current version includes pie menus and is explained in depth in a video released by Hopkins. Since its primary objective is education, the OLPC project is looking not just for games, but for tools that enable kids to program their own games. Hopkins programmed Micropolis to make it easy to extend in many interesting ways. He added functionality to let kids create new disasters and agents (like the monster, tornado, helicopter and train), and program them like in many of the other games on the XO. The goals of deeply integrating ''SimCity'' with OLPC's

Sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double ...

user interface are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming.SimCity for OLPC: Applying Papert's Ideas About Constructionist Education and Teaching Kids to Program
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''The Sims''

'' The Sims'' is a simulation video game developed by Electronic Arts. The games are known for their very loose guidelines and no specific user goals. They allow the users to simply exist in the virtual world they create. Don Hopkins became involved in ''The Sims'' after he worked at

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

. ''The Sims'' were a theme in his work since then and he has contributed to much of the design and conceptual development of the game. He was hired to port ''The Sims'' to Unix. He implemented the usage of pie menus to the game so that users could efficiently carry out actions in the game world.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hopkins, Don Living people American computer scientists Human–computer interaction Cellular automatists University of Maryland, College Park alumni SimCity Year of birth missing (living people)