The Gamification of XFEL Education Using XFEL Crystal Blaster

Abstract

Novel groundbreaking techniques, such as serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX), which utilizes X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), have led to impressive advances in the field of structural biology. However, educating the next generation of scientists on this complex, advanced, and continuously evolving field can be challenging. Gamification has been shown to be an effective strategy for engaging new learners and has a positive influence on knowledge acquisition, student satisfaction, and motivation. Here, we present an educational game, XFEL Crystal Blaster, aimed at increasing middle and high school students’ exposure to advanced topics in crystallography. This simple and accessible game is available on multiple platforms, is intuitive for gamers, and requires no prior knowledge of the game’s content. The assessment of students’ experiences with the game suggests that the XFEL Crystal Blaster game is likely to develop some introductory knowledge of XFELs and X-ray crystallography and increase interest in learning more about X-ray crystallography. Both of these outcomes are key to engaging students in the exploration of emerging scientific fields that are potential career pathways.

Macromolecular Serial Crystallography (Volume II)

“…The main goal of this Special Issue on "Macromolecular Serial Crystallography (Volume II)", along with the previous Special Issue (Macromolecular Serial Crystallography), has been to gather research manuscripts from experts in the field to create an international platform to provide rich research and reference information on the latest advances and exciting discoveries in the technology of serial crystallography at XFELs and synchrotron radiation sources. This Special Issue contains four interesting manuscripts-three research manuscripts [1][2][3] and a review article [4].…”

“…The research article by Shi and Liu [2] presents a new program called EM-detwin to overcome the common indexing ambiguity problem that is present in many serial crystallography data sets. Due to the nature of the serial crystallography experiments, the unknown orientation of crystals makes that more than one indexing solutions are equally good for a single diffraction pattern to satisfy peak position constraints.…”