It would be cool to have a "classroom mode" where several players could gather online. There would be a dedicated chat channel for the classroom. One person would be the demonstrator, and the other people could see what that person was doing in foldit, so that person could demonstrate a technique.
This should work across groups. It would be especially helpful for the tutorials, but I could see a lot of other places where it would be useful.
Excellent suggestion!
Four of the Anthropic Dreams team members met in Connecticut for a couple of hours a few weeks ago - it was amazing how we were all able to learn different techniques from each other in person that we had tried to describe in group chat with no luck at all.
Some things just don't translate well in words, but to be able to really see first hand what our top folders do would be invaluable for all of us.
Ahh! I want movie from that meeting! ;] And full set of screencaps :)
As long it is just an idea, Something like this could be done via TeamViewer.
The "teacher" could send what's on his desktop to others.
I checked out Teamviewer. Excellent idea… but the free version only allows one client connection, which defeats the purpose of the "classroom". And I am sure most players don't have (or won't shell out) the money to purchase the more extensive versions.
Oh, I didn't know that.
I've got two friends who work in PC hardware/software customer support, I will ask them if they know some freeware which is similar to TeamViewer.
Skype?
Skype does video, voice and conference calls, as well as screen sharing. Or does it have some other limitation that I'm not aware of? I once had some students watch me play Foldit on skype to examine interactions with the game, tools, etc. It seemed to work quite well.
Mark
A friend (working on software customer support) told me, that with skype, it would work, but the "teacher" would have to do portforwarding and tell the skype his IP, if it is okay for him.
He suggested VNC for these purposes:
There are some Windows-optimized versions of VNC, but regular, it is platform-independent, so even people with different OS should be able to connect.
Bottleneck for private networks is the low upload (sending) bandwidth, which could make problems if there are many "pupils".
Maybe we should take on the "adjustable window refresh rate" issue for the game again.
If foldit would generate not this much frames, there wouldn't have to be sended this much.