Episode 77 – Gaming for Science
Zoran Popović
Our guest this week is Zoran Popović. As director for the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington, Zoran helped create (with David Baker and Seth Cooper) Foldit – a popular online game that teaches protein folding and ultimately allows scientists to discover protein structures through crowdsourcing and community collaboration. Zoran talks to us about Foldit and using games to help solve problems facing humanity.
Links:
- Zoran Popović, University of Washington
- fold.it
- UW Center for Game Science
- “Gamers Unravel the Secret Life of Proteins” (Wired.com)
- “Foldit Gamers Solve Riddle of HIV Enzyme Within 3 Weeks” (Scientific American)
- Educurious
- “Physics of the Yellow Angry Bird“, by Rhett Allain (Wired.com)
- Dreambox
- Refraction
To listen to this episode, download the mp3 directly, find us on iTunes, or use the player below.
I’m a Special Ed teacher and my learners are all over the place when it comes to learning styles. However, they LOVE to play video games and some of the stuff out there is really very cool to watch. I also learn alot about individual learning styles and preferences through observing and playing games with them. Right now the rage is LEGOS in my classroom. I look forward to exploring the links you have given me to find.it and refraction and well as dream box. Thanks so much for your pod casts. They are so entertaining and educational for this curious teacher in the trenches…looking forward to more of your interviews. Have a great Spring.
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I really liked this episode and think there’s a great future for games in the classroom. I teach biology (and sometimes microbiology) and will definitely integrate foldit into next semester’s lesson – I’m thinking of letting top scorers take a ’10’ on the week’s quiz as inducement to try it out. I have had a lot of trouble getting my students to buy-in on the chemistry that I teach early in the semester, but I think it’s essential for them to appreciate the fact that chemistry and physics lay the rules that all biology follows. Foldit looks like a great way to jump start their interest.
I’ve also started a game company and hope (fingers crossed) to get a couple of the genetics games I’ve designed made for use in the classroom as well.
Thanks for the lead guys!
-Jack