A printable kit for a family night. Use your browser's Print (⌘/Ctrl-P). Scan any stop to open it.
Fold Night in a Box
Five stops, about 45 minutes, two to six players, ages 9 and up. Nothing is scored, nothing is kept, and nobody needs an account. One person is the host and keeps time.
Under nine? Give them a helper seat: they keep the timer, pick who goes next and hold the beads. Reading is never their job.
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Stop 1 · Opener · hands · 10 minutes
A chain by hand
Thread 20 beads, buttons or paper clips onto a string. Each player folds the string into a shape and lays it down. Then fold it again.
The string lands in a new shape every time: the beads have no reason to sit one way rather than another.
A protein is a chain too, but its parts are different from each other, so some folded shapes are far more stable than the rest. Most protein chains settle into nearly the same shape every time. Some stretches never settle and stay floppy.
Scan the code to see today’s protein. The strip under it shows which parts AlphaFold is sure about and which it is not.
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Stop 2 · Main game · 10 minutes
BarBet
One player holds the device. Everyone else calls out a bet: how much of the chain is very high, confident, low and very low?
Slide the dividers to the table’s bet, lock it, and see the model’s real bar. The page counts how many residues the bet put in a different band, beside what an even split would get.
Pass the device on for the next protein.
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Stop 3 · Party round · 10 minutes
No purpose words
Each player explains what one protein does in two sentences. The others listen for a purpose word: wants, tries, decides, knows, needs to, in order to, loves.
A protein has no plans. "Haemoglobin wants oxygen" becomes "Oxygen sticks to the iron in haemoglobin where there is a lot of it, and comes off where there is little."
Scan the code to play VerbSnap, the same idea against a timer.
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Stop 4 · Everyone · 10 minutes
Nobel night: guess the decade
Read each card aloud. Everyone writes the decade they think the prize was given. Older players may have an edge here, so younger players go first.
The host reads the answers from the strip at the bottom of the page. Scan the code to read each story.
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Stop 5 · Closer · 5 minutes
One protein together
Look at today’s protein one more time. Each person says one thing they noticed. That is the end of the night.
To keep one, print its card: every protein on Fold Commons has one at /card.
Nobel cards (stop 4)
- A. Linus Pauling: “for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances.” Which decade?
- B. Frederick Sanger, Walter Gilbert, Paul Berg: “for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids (Sanger and Gilbert), and for fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA (Berg).” Which decade?
- C. Roger Kornberg: “for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.” Which decade?
- D. David Baker, Demis Hassabis, John Jumper: “for computational protein design (Baker), and for protein structure prediction (Hassabis and Jumper).” Which decade?
Host: fold this strip under before you hand the page round.
A: 1950s · B: 1980s · C: 2000s · D: 2020s