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Foldit Practice: Science or Gaming?
- 1. FOLDIT PRACTICE: Science or Gaming? Theresa Horstman (thorst@uw.edu, @thorst) Mark Chen (markchen@uw.edu, @mcdanger) Seth Cooper (scooper@cs.washington.edu) Philip Bell (pbell@uw.edu, @philiplbell) University of Washington, Seattle This work is funded by the DARPA under Award# FA8750-11-2-0102. However, all opinions are strictly our own.
- 3. Research Questions Are Foldit players learning science? Do players learn the biochemistry of protein structures and the principles behind efficient folds? Are Foldit players engaged in scientific practice?
- 4. Project Overview Part of a multi-year, 3 phase research plan Completed phase one in late 2011 Preliminary results include public forum data Phase two will incorporate IRC data
- 5. CODING STRANDS 1. Sparking and Developing Interest and Excitement 2. Understanding Scientific Knowledge (content) 3. Engaging in Scientific Explanation and Argument 4. Understanding Scientific Enterprise 5. Engaging in Scientific Practices—Using the Tools and Language of Science 6. Identifying with the Scientific Enterprise 7. Navigating Scientific Practice
- 6. ―….I'll try shifting something else or shifting things in a different directions. Additionally, aromatic (ring-containing) residue stacking seems to help a lot….. Moving the backbone and/or selecting rotamers so that the rings of tyrosines/phenylalanines stack can help scores significantly…..When the sidechains turn blue using the attractiveness coloring, you know they're set correctly. –Frank‖ (11-29-2007)
- 7. SCIENCE OR GAME? Organized forum posts by threads Approximately 2344 posts – 1169 coded Coded posts Science knowledge content = 217 Game content = 538 Scientific practice = 378 Coded threads
- 8. FRAMEWORK FOR K-12 SCIENCE ED Asking questions (science) and defining problems (engineering) Developing and using models Planning and carrying out investigations Analyzing and interpreting data Using mathematics and computational thinking Developing explanations (science) and designing solutions (engineering) Engaging in argument from evidence Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information
- 10. 1 “Being totally novice, I think intuition plays a very big part here. I just learned the basic rules and am doing rather well, if I do say so myself. (Rather well being in the top 20 %, but maybe I was lucky, and struggling) So I would have to say…. that you don't need scientific knowledge to be good at this game…. Just go with what looks and feels good…. I do hope that even though I'm not top dog, my solutions will be used in the research..….If not, I might as well be playing Battefield, or something.” –response to OP asking which players have science knowledge
- 11. 2 “Thanks for telling me about the wiki, however I probably am not going to read through that whole thing and I suspect neither is any ADHD teenage gamer, call me lazy, but I don't feel… your average gamers who are used to built-in tutorials that cover all the basics (every game I've ever played) are going to spend much time outside the game learning… let's be realistic if we are trying to reach gamers as the target audience for crowd sourcing.…‖ –response to OP asking about how to teach new players
- 12. 3 “Does the score completely ignore salt bridges, metal ion coordination, disulfide bonds, and hydrogen bonding along the side chain? These are pretty important interactions in proteins.‖ “You are obviously more technically aware of this protein folding business then I, but I can tell you by observation that hydrogen bonds are indeed factored both in to the score, and into the behavior of the proteins, as well as shown on your display (If you chose them in the VIEW menu). Indeed, I believe you will find puzzle 44 very interesting. It begins with a few hydrogen bonds, and you will find you don't score over about 8,900 without making many more.‖
- 14. Science practice What is science learnin distributed Gamer as scientist Reconfiguration of science content in a new format that allows the technology to carry the science Gamer and content. scientist Gamer, scientist & designer
- 15. REDEFINING GAMES AND SCIENCE 1. Within Foldit, are there practices that are not scientific? 2. Does player awareness of their lack of science knowledge change how they view science or reinforce existing beliefs? 3. In classrooms, one aspect of engaging in scientific practice is adopting the language of scientists. Does this type of classroom practice mean the same thing in an informal space such as Foldit? 4. What are the consequences of separating science knowledge from scientific practice without inhibiting a persons ability to contribute to a scientific community? 5. How do we value different types of expert knowledge within a scientific community?
- 16. CONTINUING WORK: MODIFIED FOR THE CLASSROOM Foldit (public) Foldit (Educurious)
- 17. THANK YOU Foldit Practice: Science or Gaming? Theresa Horstman (thorst@uw.edu, @thorst) Mark Chen (markchen@uw.edu, @mcdanger) Seth Cooper (scooper@cs.washington.edu) Philip Bell (pbell@uw.edu, @philiplbell) University of Washington, Seattle This work is funded by the DARPA under Award# FA8750-11-2-0102. However, all opinions are strictly our own.
Editor's Notes
- This presentation was given at the Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco in March 2012.
- Foldit is a free, online multi-player protein folding game and at the time of the Nature article* in August of 2010 had over 57,000 players.The game was designed in conjunction with scientists at Baker Labs at the UW. Scientists working with game designers and developers modeled 3D puzzles to help scientists solve real scientific problems including the discovery made in the most recent article in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (2011).What is amazing about Foldit is that the principle design is to use a large population of players competing and collaborating to solve protein folding puzzles faster than computers. They’ve found that players are faster, more creative, and better problem solvers than computers set to solve similar tasks. This crowd-source driven research agenda creates an interesting space to think about how players came to be a part of the science community through game play – leading up to and including authors of scientific articles.*Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game in Nature, August 2010
- There’s a ton of potential for looking at what this means to the scientific community, gaming community, and education. As learning scientists our immediate research questions are: Are Foldit players learning science? Such as whether or not players are learning the biochemistry of protein structures and the principles behind efficient folds?, Are Foldit players engaged in scientific practice? The answer to these questions may result is a shift in how we categorize and think about science and scientific practice which includes approaching a deeper issue of challenging distinct categories like gamers and scientists.As a result this may challenge what it means to teach and learn science – or at least what it means to participate in scientific communities.
- The research is situated in a set of studies specific to games for learning. Our result are preliminary and represent the early stages of a longer study.We anticipate to see that in-game chat (and mirrors what we’ve seen) that corresponding with forum data – but our analysis is pending IRB approval.There are two aspects we think are of interest. One is the strategy for coding the forum posts because we ran into some unexpected challenges in trying to make sense of the data in relation to our questions. The other is our preliminary results on the interconnectedness of gamer and scientist.(Forum posts collected in Summer 2011)
- Our initial coding strategy was to categorize the posts into seven strands.The first 6 strands are adapted from the NRC (National Research Council) Reports Learning Science in Informal Environments & Surrounded by Scienceand the 7th strand was adapted from the work of Steven’s et al in their work on navigating knowledge in Becoming an Engineer: Toward a Three Dimensional View of Engineering Learning (2008) and Bell (in press) for the combination. We’d intended to use these as gage to measure the type of science learning that may be taking place.--------------------Bell, P., Lewenstein, B., Shouse, A.W. & Feder, M.A. (Eds.). National Research Council. (2009). Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. Committee on Learning Science in Informal Environments, Board on Science Education, National Research Council. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.Stevens, R., O’Connor, K., Garrison, L., Jocuns, A., & Amos, D. M. (2008). Becoming an engineer: Toward a three dimension view of engineering learning. Journal of Engineering Education, 97(3), 355-368.Bell, P., Bricker, L. A., Reeve, S., Zimmerman, H. T., & Tzou, C. (in press). Discovering and Supporting Successful Learning Pathways of Youth In and Out Of School: Accounting for the Development of Everyday Expertise Across Settings. In B. Bevan, P. Bell, R. Stevens & A. Razfar (Eds.), Learning about Out of School Time (LOST) Learning Opportunities. London: Springer.
- As we looked through the posts (like this one) it quickly became clear the difficulty in classifying the posts as it changed depending on how you chose to interpret it. There were too many assumptions built into this coding scheme and we needed to break it down into simpler categories and develop a more robust coding scheme over time.
- The simpler categories allowed us to identify science knowledge—phrases or comments having to do with science (not just protein folding), game content—anything regarding content within the game, game play and game strategies, and scientific practice—this is anything demonstrating scientific thinking, argument, reasoning, hypotheses and testing.This coding strategy allowed us to see the volume and trends of posts related to science content and scientific practice. We were also able to identify posts which contained only game content and scientific practice. There is a lot happening in the interconnectedness of these three categories so we also created a synopsis of threads to account for what was happening through the course of these conversations.
- Lastly, we settled on a framework for K-12 Science Ed, eight classroom practices (which is modeled after what experts do and sets the stage for the next 10-15 years of science education) and the original 7 strands. The Framework opens up a hybridity learning space between science and engineering -- defining problems and designing solutions to them are clearly related to protein folding challenge work. After classifying posts into the threecategorieswe were better able to justify our choices into these more complex categories.---------National Research Council. (2011). A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Committee on Conceptual Framework for the New K-12 Science Education Standards, Board on Science Education, National Research Council. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
- So who are these people playing Foldit? Are they all secretly wannabe scientists? Do they consider themselves scientists now that they’ve published?From the 2010 Nature article Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game supplemental material, a majority of the players surveyed didn’t have prior knowledge of biochemistry. In the same article, they explain that “So while no more than perhaps half a thousand people have really driven Foldit (at least in the very restricted sense of improvements to the score), the situation is not that of a handful of experts or savants leading a blind majority…..The expertise acquired in the game appears to be diversified, instead of concentrated with a few individuals.” (p. 3).This description of the distribution of expertise within the Foldit community informed how we looked at the forum posts.
- So through the course of adapting our own coding scheme over time to reflect the complexities of how science and game are combined and analyzing the contents of the posts we began to realize that the talk around Foldit is a challenge to categorize into the existing frameworks—it’s messy—as the gaming is inseparable from the science. This complexity holds serious consequences to many built-in assumptions about education and learning. For example, In this post, the player openly acknowledges its unnecessary to know science but still wants his/her work to be used in research.
- In this post, the author dismisses a suggestion to go to the wiki to learn how to play and instead argues for better game design, not necessarily to improve learning but to improve game play. The author emphasizes gaming expertise as a way of improving game play to draw in larger numbers, therefore improving the chances of solving puzzles.
- In this post (top) and response (below) we see the merging between scientific expertise (top) integrated with building game play expertise (both). There is something interesting here between the game mechanic of “score” and the understanding of scientific content enmeshed with scientific practice – both as the novice (below) picks up scientific expertise from the top and through building gaming expertise. These examples point to the variance among players and challenge the idea of the “understanding of science” by making visible different levels of expertiseas Foldit players participate in a scientific community.
- Our preliminary conclusion is that in the instance of Foldit science and gaming are inseparable. The presence of self-identified (and industry confirmed) non-scientists contributing to- and participating in- scientific communities and practices may point to a disruption in how we think of science education. This includes challenging traditional notions of science learning historically rooted in learning science content – if students are not learning science content then its not science. In instances such as Foldit, valued participation within a scientific community does not exclude those without science content knowledge but rather utilizes different types of expertise mediated through a game.
- We’ve been focused on the science content, game content and scientific practice but if we consider the player being situated into a larger community or network of non-science and scientific practitioners then we have to consider the Foldit players in relation to the scientists at Baker Labs who use the results the players achieve to further their scientific work. In addition, it may be important to consider the construction of the game and how the game designer and developer are now implicated in the network. This includes accurately capturing the correct metaphor to represent, visualize and interact with content. The quality of representation of the science as a game is an essential component for the gamer to exist as scientist--if the representation of scientific content was faulty or misaligned this entire practice couldn’t work. This leads us to reconsider how the details of Foldit practice speak to a type of expertise and participation within a larger network engaged in a scientific endeavor in which from a distance may not matter whether some activities are labeled science or gaming.
- This leads to a whole new set of questions that may disrupt how we think about science, science education and using games for learning. 1. Another way of saying this is would anyone at the Baker lab say what they are doing is not science? This calls out the broader science community.2. When players are aware of their lack of science knowledge does it change how they view science or reinforce existing beliefs?3. The articulation of everyday vernacular within a domain (like Foldit) in relation to the discourse of science is a known problem -- there are productive hybrid discourses that start to make the phenomena technical -- although it may not be scientific discourse at first -- but for some who need to speak in that code of power (a la Delpit), there are instructional techniques to leverage vernacular discourse and refine it into the disciplinary discourse (so people can code switch if they need to).4. This also leaves open the potential for an expert with all the content knowledge to not do as well as an expert player. 5. This points to the importance of the accuracy of the visual manifestation of the protein folding problem into interactions that are comprehensive yet accessible.
- Educurious is project-based curriculum designed using a custom social-networking site. The genetics course that elected to use Foldit as part of their curriculum was designed and enacted by Leah Bricker and Katie Van Horne (both from the University of Washington). A select set of puzzles aligned with the curriculum was set aside for classroom use. Additional prompts were added to link to educational content specific to that level. This enactment was just completed this week (February 27, 2012). Data is still being collected and analyzed but the analysis will lend insight to answering these questions about blending science learning, scientific practice, and gaming.
- We’d also like to thank our coworkers at the University of Washington,Shelley Stromholt for the initial coding scheme of the 6 strands, Tiffany Lee for providing the LSIE framework, and Katie van Horne and Leah Bricker for sharing their work on Educurious Foldit.