Introducing Foldit Education Mode v2 on the Web

In 2020, as the pandemic set in and classes moved online, the Foldit team realized they had a tremendous opportunity to help the science education community that was desperate for good science learning tools. They therefore created and released Foldit Education Mode in August 2020 as a ready-made teaching tool for biochemistry that instructors could use easily and freely in their courses. In the past five years, at least hundreds of educators and many thousands of students have used Foldit Education Mode.

While Foldit Education Mode was greatly successful at meeting the challenge of the moment, it still had flaws that would hold some students back from using it. The Foldit team also recently published a quantitative assessment of learning with Foldit Education Mode (https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.21906), and while it was fulfilling its purpose, there was definitely also room to improve.

That’s why they're very excited to introduce their second release of Foldit Education Mode with improved levels and teaching tools, but even more excitingly: now available on the web! This means no more downloads required, and compatibility with any computer type. For many, this will enable use of Foldit in the classroom that was never previously possible, and for many more a great degree of increased flexibility and improved user experience.

To play Foldit Education Mode on the web, please go to https://play.fold.it/, and you can start playing immediately! You’ll notice several updates to the user interface along with the new and improved puzzles. The number of puzzles is slightly larger, but this change was largely made to break up levels that had too much biochemistry and gameplay content all rolled together, and by separating it out, the learning experience becomes considerably easier.

In the long term, the Foldit team plans to explore the possibility of hosting smaller Science puzzles to help bridge the gap for new players who start with the web version, but that will require more work to complete. In the meantime, they hope that educators and students worldwide will enjoy the new and improved experience, and those who couldn’t participate before will now be able to.

As always, the Foldit team would appreciate finding out who is using Foldit Education Mode, as they don’t collect that data; it really helps with procuring more funding to support these efforts. So if you do use it, please drop them a line at mail.fold.it@gmail.com.

This post originated from the Foldit blog post https://fold.it/forum/blog/introducing-foldit-education-mode-v2-on-the-web

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