The other night Brourd suggested that he could fly to every players house and give a live walkthrough on puzzle solving. Hoglahoo then mentioned webcast walkthroughs.
That made me think of that I am dreaming about having some biology teaching specially directed at Eterna players. We should have teaching of our players, not just in game techniques, but also in genetics and chemistry. All that interesting stuff that has relation to RNA.
Starry said that maybe we could get a grant to hire a professional. Brourd suggested that we could get some Stanford biology classes downloaded.
I would like to have a teacher, like eg. Eric Lander, who is really burning for this field and propably could explain genetics so it is understandable to newbies. I have been following some of his MIT biology classes and he is an inspiration and makes me feel welcome in the field of biology.
Brourd asked what I wanted us to learn? I want us to know some of the chemical and genetic stuff about RNA and DNA and how they differ from each other. As Brourd mentioned, allow players to go through some specialized course work.
There are already lots of biology courses out on the web. The problem is that most is not suited for a part of the Eterna audience. We haven’t read the books the students following the course have.
I want us to learn real science, I just want to lower the bar a bit to raise it a lot later. I want more people in on this. Starry and Brourd helped me coin the potential course title.
I post this in the forum so EteRNA crew will know that it is a wish. As Brourd said: We all have the dream.
Eli,
Actually, we are working on a grant with NOVA which will give them funding to create a series of intro videos which will both explain the game and some of the surrounding biochemistry.
I think it’s going to be great, although it probably won’t be integrated into the game until Fall 2012 or Winter/Spring 2013. 
In the meantime, though, I wonder how we could do a better job training (and integrating) beginning players. One of the major strengths of EteRNA is our amazing community of “expert” players. I wonder if we could leverage that some way? (I know that you all already do a lot to help beginning players.) One crazy idea: what we if we organized weekly classes during which expert players could help beginners understand the game?
Weekly classes would be nice. A scheduled time and duration posted somewhere where new players will see it could get it going quickly. I think others besides beginners would benefit as well
Hi Adrien!
I’m happy to hear about your collaboration with NOVA on creating a series of intro videos.
I like your ”crazy” idea about having eterna players having class time in the chat. Here are my thoughts:
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It should be officially implemented
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It should be a limited amount of time, like an hour to make sure there are enough players around to both ask and answer questions.
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I want a dev on the sideline, to help answer some of the questions that we can’t answer.
Mat suggested that if we got to work with a dev member or student we could make a better Introduction and knowledge sharing.
Message from Mat to me:
I was just thinking about you comment/suggestion “Hogla and Mat, I also think this class thing have to be set at a limited amount of time, like an hour”
If the time/datas were set, then (a quick idea were trying to sleep) maybe the sessions could recorded at the eterna server end and than make available (in-time) via a postcast/video download or share site. Plus maybe the sessions could be on a separate page/site something like when we have a beta. I think if it was a separate site, the people who join/visit that site during a sessions would have to a agree to a site agreement with one of the conditions being that the session is being recorded and would showed/released at a later point in time.
These are all great ideas. We’ll talk about them in the meeting today.
