Science-based games and explorable explanations | Hacker News Reader

Science-based games and explorable explanations

p.migdal.pl

68 pointsstared13 comments

There was a flash game I played where you did (maybe pseudo) protein folding. It gave you a desired shape and you had to pick bases to make it go together.

Once made it would give you some estimates on temperature-range etc. and you could tweak the bases to attempt to improve the temperature stability without making it go haywire.

I can't remember what it was called, but I had fun with it. I wonder what happened to it in a post Flash world.

You might find https://fold.it interesting.

I think that might be its successor. I managed to track that back to the game I played

It was called eterna https://eternagame.org/

Interesting link in the page https://github.com/stared/science-based-games-list

there's zero examples of this employed successfully.

What about kerbal?

Minecraft is LEGO bricks for the modern age - and, well, it is popular.

As the blog post mentioned, "SpaceChem and Kerbal Space Program sold over 1 million and over 2 million copies on Steam."

If you mean "putting a game in a curriculum so that people will be forced to play it" - please don't.

name one single game that people will play willingly where one single fact is learned. none of those qualify.

“Facts”?

To take the Kerbal example, you could go read in a textbook that:

“The Hohmann manouver is the most energy-efficient two-impulse maneuver for transferring between two coplanar circular orbits sharing a common focus. The Hohmann transfer is an elliptical orbit tangent to both circles on its apse line... The periapsis and apoapsis of the transfer ellipse are the radii of the inner and outer circles, respectively.”

You could even memorise that fact and regurgitate it on the exam.

But, speaking as someone with a physics degree, there was nothing like playing Kerbal to get a really intuitive feel for orbital mechanics. To go from “oh yeah, I vaguely remember something called a Hohmann transfer and I guess I could do some maths to work out the specifics if you give me some time” to “well, obviously….”

The article is almost entirely a list of successful examples.

of learning what??? successfull example of empty marketing

i have to leave this here www.molecularreality.com

Unfortunately that doesn't help because MR makes no attempt to explain what their product does.

The website just has the thing you can buy, described in terms the average college educated adult has never learned, and a privacy-disrespecting chatbot.

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