Foldit: Citizen science as a means for identifying lead compounds in drug discovery

About this resource

Description

This resource describes the use of an ongoing citizen science project, fold.it, in a second-year undergraduate laboratory activity. The pedagogical framework around this citizen science project aims to offer students an engaging, real-world research experience while fostering an understanding of science and its place in society.

Length

Multi-week

Pedagogical backing

Rationale

The current disruption to face-to-face teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic forced us as practitioners to consider how we could deliver the laboratory-specific learning outcomes over remote teaching. Through the use of Foldit as an ongoing citizen science project tackling global issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic, this activity provides a contextualised research experience that immerses students within an authentic research experience. The open-endedness of this activity encourages student-led learning alongside the formation of unified groups of students in a format analogous to a community of practice. Finally, in the assessment of this activity, we have placed a strong focus on students placing science within a societal context and translating scientific research to a format accessible by a general audience.

How is the resource used

This resource is designed to be a self-contained online laboratory activity. The task is largely self-directed by the students (with the support of the supplementary information and task objectives). I used this in 2020 to accommodate the special circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic – I intend to use this permanently as part of the standard laboratory program (I’m moving towards multi-week laboratory projects so this will allow me to retain the same number of assessment tasks while diversifying the skillset developed and assessed).

Student evaluation

A pilot laboratory activity utilising Foldit in a similar manner was run in Semester 1, 2020 in an advanced first-year chemistry unit with 77 students. The submitted activity was an expansion of the pilot into second-year, building on lessons learned in Semester 1 including detailed feedback from USS scores and unsolicited feedback on the assessment task and expectations. The submitted task was implemented in Semester 2, 2020 as a second-year dry laboratory alternative exercise due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Respectively, 100 second-year students undertook this experiment in 2020. Speaking specifically to the second-year variation as presented in this resource, anecdotal evidence has been collected through conversations with individual students and quality of the work produced (exemplars provided in supplementary information).

Authors

Reyne Pullen (reyne.pullen@sydney.edu.au)
Alice Motion (alice.motion@sydney.edu.au)
Alexander Yuen (alexander.yuen@sydney.edu.au)