mikiem2
Moderator
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/ff_rnagame
New Videogame Lets Amateur Researchers Mess With RNA
Article talks about EteRNA -- http://eterna.cmu.edu/eterna_page.php?page=me_tab
1st you had stuff like Folding@Home -- this takes the concept a bit further. Oversimplified you try to create target shapes of RNA, with a chance to see if your result actually works when/if they try to make it in a lab. The world's top player according to the article was/is a Match 3 addict.
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
This may be a game my spouse could use as a teaching tool. she lectures and teaches biology to sixth form students (17 to 19 year olds). Thanks for posting mikiem
mikiem2
Moderator
she lectures and teaches biology to sixth form students (17 to 19 year olds).
Cool! My mom [long retired] was a teacher, & I always admired the profession. When I was young considered going into teaching, but at the time getting a teaching job of any sort, at any level was very iffy.
Nowadays here in the U.S it's extremely political, & professors & teachers are sometimes suffering quite the backlash. If you're conservative you catch all sorts of problems from other teachers/profs & the school, but the public loves you -- if you're liberal, no problems at work, but everyone else hates you... there have been several cases of teacher/profs maybe crossing the line idealistically, & they've found themselves featured on national TV, & not in a good way. And while every profession has people who are poor at their job, the public in their anger seeks out those teachers/profs & spotlights them, casting all those who do a great job in a very poor light.
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
I also taught; initially from 11 to 19 year olds. Though my last post was as a lecturer in Health & Social Care to school leavers and adult returners to education. I'd trained as a nurse to be able to take up the post as it was a requirement that you had a health related job previously.
The trouble with teaching in the UK is that they change the syllabus virtually on a yearly basis. Removing subject matter and adding new. Every year my wife has to completely rewrite her lecture and teaching notes. On top of that they are inspected every three or four years by government appointed inspectors who literally tear the department apart looking at resources, methods of teaching etc and once yearly she is observed and rated by senior management while teaching. If your ratings are below a certain standard you stand to lose a portion of your wages. She gets a basic rate plus extras for teaching excellence. It is the add-on for excellence that can be taken away. They do not take into account that you may have a particularly difficult class to teach. My wife has in the past been inspected with what she's described as the worst class she's ever taught. At the time three or four students arrived late for the class apparently she was expected to admonish them when they arrived, but she dealt with it different;y from what they expected so she lost points. thankfully overall she still retained her extras as they used three different lessons to mark her teaching abilities
mikiem2
Moderator
Looong ago teacher's pay used to be really dismal -- many had to take summer jobs to help finance the rest of the year when they were teaching. Then they got unionized, and wages became comparable with other professions requiring 4 years of college, e.g. an engineer or whatever. Next the different school districts started changing their individual education requirements, which made it rough since a teacher looking for a job was often under-educated, so they didn't qualify, or over-educated, so the school district wouldn't hire them feeling they'd leave for more money at 1st opportunity.
Then the unions started getting carried away, demanding more money & benefits, mostly getting the benefits -- an individual teacher's retirement benefit in some places costs the state over $1 mill. That meant school principles & school district employees made more, unionized or not, just to keep up. Administration was always political, but things Really got political then, as these jobs along with teaching became highly desirable just for the income & benefits, whether you liked teaching or not, had Any skills at it or not.
So today it's almost impossible to fire or reduce the pay of many teachers &/or school board employees -- in New York they have many teachers they won't let teach, so they report daily to rooms where however many teachers just pass the day however they like.
Charter schools are something fairly new, not every city or state allows them, but they're basically private schools that'll take anybody, competing with the public ones run by the gov. -- the controversial part is the money to run charter schools comes from the pool of funds the gov uses to pay for the public schools. And charter schools often have things like the merit-based pay your wife gets, WR. The unions thoroughly loath the concept -- in the unionized public schools everything is based on seniority, so the more years you have in, the higher your pay, & the safer you are from any layoffs should they close a school. If a teacher or teachers don't do their job & student test scores fall, typically they'll lower the curve until they can re-write the curriculum making it easier.
Interestingly Microsoft got involved some years ago helping the federal gov come up with methods to track performance so they could identify problems & apply resources to fix them. You don't hear MS mention that now as the whole effort became a political hot potato -- read yesterday that according to fed. gov. reporting, unions spent I think it was $4.5 bill from 2005 -- 2011 on political activism & donations, so it's small wonder.
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