Foldit in schools!

Started by Antikeen

admin Staff Lv 1

Redstone have still not responded; I've sent them a followup email to the same address. If that doesn't help, I will see about contacting someone there directly.

admin

admin Staff Lv 1

Redstone have replied (3 days ago, in fact, but I didn't get to it until now). They do not actually block us. They elaboarated: first, users may add custom filters, so your school may have gone to the effort of custom blocking foldit. Users may in fact even use whitelists, in which case foldit would not be unblocked without positive action; that is perhaps most likely. Second, many local profiles forbid the download of executables, which may of course prevent you from installing foldit.

admin

Ben.Lampert Lv 1

in my school (7th grade) we don'ty do it 4 comp class, but our comp teacher got us folding and i've learned a lot. i think foldit in schools is a great idea

JonnyBoy100 Lv 1

They don't block this site at my middle school. The only problem is they won't let us download anything. I think I'll tell my science tacher about this though. He get's all hyped up if you mention ANYTHING having to do with life science. maybe he's got connections.

Stoichi Lv 1

Thanks for linking me in to this thread. I teach Chemistry, AP Chemistry, and Organic Chemistry at our local high school. Before this summer I knew virtually nothing about biochemistry and protein folding. I had heard of distributed computing projects like Folding@Home and Rosetta, but that was about it. This summer I took a class entitled Modeling the Molecular World http://cbm.msoe.edu/profDev/mmw1/index.html) at MSOE hosted by: http://www.3dmoleculardesigns.com/

One of the teachers in my department also runs a SMART Team (wonderful program!):

http://cbm.msoe.edu/stupro/smart/index.html

This year we are implementing amino acids and protein folding across our chemistry classes. We are starting with students building amino acids from molymod models. We will then have student groups begin linking amino acids through condensation. This is their introduction to primary structure. Prior to the lesson, students will have learned about intermolecular forces, including hydrogen bonding. We are going to use the "amino acid kit" (http://www.3dmoleculardesigns.com/news2.php#aminoacid) to have students protein fold before fold.it. Our students will have already studied polar and nonpolar molecules, so hydrophobic and hydrophilic sidechains are a natural extension. Before even trying fold.it, our students will have made crude tertiary structures using these model kits. We have a final lesson involving the amino acid kit and secondary structure. At long last, we will show them fold.it to cap the lesson. We have already done this with our AP class. There is a ton of enthusiasm for fold.it, and I feel like the students are getting more out of it having studied the folding principles ahead of time.

Our Principal is very supportive. Our school firewall is not so supportive. I can run fold.it with limited functionality in our classroom. I can show the tutorials, which is good enough. My hope is to eventually get other local high schools competing with each other on fold.it. My students already want varsity and jv teams, t-shirts, etc.

I look forward to hearing how other teachers are using fold.it.

Thanks everyone,

David