There's been a tremendous amount of interest in making video games tools for learning rather than distractions from homework. But how does one get youths as riveted to a video game about scientific problems as one about warfare? Take Foldit, which has attracted thousands of players to tackle protein-folding tasks. "One of our goals when we made Foldit is to make proteins toy-like, which is actually a technical term from game design," Adrien Treuille, a computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon, said in a recent interview at the PopTech conference. "It should be something you want to play with, like a Lego or a Tinkertoy." Article