Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Get your game on

With my tongue firmly thrust into my cheek I mentioned that in the future school teaching and testing will be done with video games. Well not so fast white boy this seems to be a good idea as a teaching tool. The premis is this, a dozen biochemists may take decades to solve a problem but a million people working on the same problem would take far less time. Enter stage right - Foldit.

Foldit is a new on-line game to teach how proteins work, with levels of play from novice to expert. As you work through each level you learn more and get a better and better at understanding on how proteins work. Scientists, through the magic of cyber space keep track of what is going on.

The co-creator of Foldit, Professor ZORAN POPOVIC, says “ This game is basically enticing huge number of people around the world to solve one of the deep scientific problems in biochemistry that pretty much has to do with the way the life functions. So what Foldit is trying to do is trying to merge computers and people together
to solve a very hard scientific problem that neither computers nor people alone can solveby themselves. ”

This is pretty cool stuff.

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