Happy (observed) birthday, Foldit!

Circle with Foldit GraphicFlashback with us to eight years ago and to a time when a little protein folding game with a big dream was unleashed upon the world. Since then, Foldit has been the subject of dozens of articles, numerous papers and presentations, won awards, and had our early days chronicled in a book. We have also appeared in a nearly countless number of articles and mentioned in other books!

These days, our community is focused on breaking new ground, with great tools like the Ramachandran map and an experimental client with tools for small molecule drug discovery!

With frequent and regular science chats, a steady stream of videos produced by the community, and new puzzles appearing to challenge players regularly, there’s never been a better time to get involved.

Also, we’ll be at Shoreline STEM festival this weekend if you want to say hi!



Winter Greetings from the Center for Game Science

openhouse“Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.” – Pietro Aretino

Here at the Center for Game Science, we are already making plans for a productive (and possibly genius)  2015. Most recently, our top games Nanocrafter and Foldit have been making the news with these headlines:

Additionally, we recently participated in UW’s Computing Open House and Seattle’s Public Library’s Hour of Code event to celebrate Computer Science Education Week. Be sure to keep an eye on some of the great things we have coming up, including:

An all new Nanocrafter website is underway. Our developers have been working diligently on this endeavor and the site is going through a final bit of testing before debuting fully upon the world. If you haven’t visited Nanocrafter in a while, make it part of your New Year resolutions to get into crowd science with this up and coming star!

Regular community chats with the scientists and developers of Foldit, with great new content planned and the likely return of Black Belt Folding, our community driven series to help guide users through some of the trickier concepts of the game.

Exciting times are also ahead for Algebra Challenge (we know you’ve been asking!) and going into next summer with our community here at UW and beyond. Be sure you are following us on all our channels to get the latest!



Foldit player visits UW!

Today we had a special visit to the Center for Game Science and Baker Lab here at the University of Washington from Foldit player and #2 ranked global soloist gmn! We had a great time swapping stories and talking shop.

Thanks for stopping by, gmn! Come back and see us again soon.