Foldit, crowdsourcing, and labor. - Slate Magazine - 1 views
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Vicki Davis on 28 Feb 12I know that some are saying that we can't gamify education. But what happens when problems become a game and we compete to find answers? This article talks about foldit and how crowdsourcing has become a possibility for something that can work when it becomes a game. This is a great read for those exploring how we will use games in education. I would suggest that this is an approach that we could use. ". Foldit, a novel experiment created by a group of scientists and game designers at the University of Washington, had asked the gamers-some still in middle school and few boasting a background in the sciences, much less microbiology-to determine the how proteins would fold in the enzyme. Within hours, thousands of people were both competing against (and collaborating with) one another. After three weeks, they had succeeded where the microbiologists and the computers had failed. "This is the first example I know of game players solving a long-standing scientific problem," David Baker, a Foldit co-creator, wrote at the time."
