USING MINECRAFT TO SIMULATE FIELD MAPPING IN A KARST ENVIRONMENT

Geoscience courses often require some amount of hands-on field work, which can be an extremely effective way to teach new concepts as students can work through the data collection and interpretation in real time. Field work also allows students to increase their spatial reasoning and develop their own working hypotheses. However, many students may face challenges that prevent them from participating in traditional field work such as mobility impairments, geographic location being devoid of karst, weather, or a number of other personal events and circumstances.

In order to make field work more accessible in a classroom setting, we have developed an educational module in the popular video game Minecraft. Minecraft is an underutilized yet ideal tool for education given the accessibility of the program and creative freedom that it allows its players. This module walks students through rock layer identification by mimicking real-life data collection processes, as well as lets students extrapolate on their own by analyzing sinkholes and using them to discover sub-surface caves and karst structures. Players are able to freely explore a 3-D simulation of an area that includes two caves, many sinkholes, and rock outcroppings that they may take data from. The students will then use this data to develop a geological interpretation on the of the region to potentially include an understanding of the formation and evolution of the cave systems.

In the future, we intend to allow to students, having developed an interpretation of the geology, to be able to take their own custom resistivity lines. This will allow them to see the subsurface resistivity data within the game and discover hidden subsurface features in locations that they hypothesize to include interesting voids, streams, and more. The Minecraft world can be exported into a format that can allow the formation of a synthetic resistivity data set. This gives students the ability to confirm or challenge their preferred geologic interpretation.