Learning chemistry within Minecraft video game

A University of Texas at Dallas team is exploring whether teaching real-world science through a popular computer game may offer a more engaging and effective educational approach than traditional concepts of instruction.

In an article recently published in Nature Chemistry, a UT Dallas team -- including a materials scientist, two chemists and a game design expert -- describes how a group of 39 college students from diverse majors played an enhanced version of the popular video game "Minecraft" and learned chemistry in the process, despite being given no in-class science instruction.

Dr. Walter Voit led the team that created "Polycraft World," an adaptation or "mod" for "Minecraft" that allows players to incorporate the properties of chemical elements and compounds into game activities. Using the mod and instructions provided on a Wiki website, players can, for example, harvest and process natural rubber to make pogo sticks, or convert crude oil into a jetpack using distillation, chemical synthesis and manufacturing processes.

"Our goal was to demonstrate the various advantages of presenting educational content in a gaming format," said Voit, a materials science and engineering professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. "An immersive, cooperative experience like that of 'Polycraft World' may represent the future of education."

Crafting a Teaching Tool

Dr. Ron Smaldone, an assistant professor of chemistry, joined the project to give the mod its accuracy as a chemistry teaching tool. Dr. Christina Thompson, a chemistry lecturer, supervised the course in which the research was conducted, and joined Smaldone in mapping out assembly instructions for increasingly complex compounds. Voit spearheaded a team of programmers that spent a full year on development of the platform.

"Eventually, we got to the point where we said, 'Hey, we can do something really neat with this,'" Voit said. "We could build a comprehensive world teaching people materials science."

For Smaldone and Voit, much of the work was finding in-game objectives that provided a proportional difficulty-reward ratio -- worth the trouble to build, but not too easy.

"If the game is too difficult, people will get frustrated. If it's too easy, they lose interest," Voit said. "If it's just right? It's addicting, it's engaging, it's compelling."

Thompson and Smaldone produced more than 2,000 methods for building more than 100 different polymers from thousands of available chemicals.

"We're taking skills 'Minecraft' gamers already have -- building and assembling things -- and applying them to scientific principles we've programmed," Smaldone said.

Some of the "Polycraft World" gamers became surprisingly proficient in processes for which they had no prior instruction, Voit said.

"We've had complete non-chemists build factories to build polyether ether ketones, which are crazy hard to synthesize," he said. "The demands of the one-hour-a-week class were limited, yet some students went all-out, consuming all this content we put in."

Dr. Monica Evans, an associate dean for graduate programs and associate professor in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, is a co-author of the paper and leads the University's game design program, which is ranked as one of the top programs in the country by The Princeton Review.

"It's quite difficult to make a good video game, much less the rare good game that is also educational," Evans said. "The ingenuity of the 'Polycraft' team is that they've harnessed the global popularity of an existing game, 'Minecraft,' and transformed it into something that is explicitly educational with a university-level subject."

Classroom Instruction Not Included

Voit and Smaldone see "Polycraft World" as an early step on the road to a new format for learning without classroom instruction.

"The games that already exist mostly serve only as a companion to classroom learning," Smaldone said. "The goal here is to make something that stands alone."

A significant advantage of using such a tool comes in the volume of data it returns on student performance.

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