USING MINECRAFT TO SIMULATE FIELD MAPPING IN A KARST ENVIRONMENT

Field work experience is a vital part of a geoscientist’s education, helping students develop vital skills such as 3-D spatial reasoning, proper data collection methods, and hypothesis development. However, field work experiences are often not fully accessible to many students, due to mobility impairments or other disabilities, harsh weather, financial barriers, personal events or other circumstances.

To combat these issues, we developed a virtual field camp module using the video game Minecraft. Minecraft is an ideal tool for custom educational experiences given the game’s accessibility features and highly modifiable nature. As the highest-selling game of all time, many students will already be familiar with the interface, leading to a much shorter learning curve compared to fully custom programs.

Our model replicates a karstic area in Highland County, Virginia, where caves, sinkholes, and other features have been carved from the Silurian and Devonian limestones. We have constrained the topography of the model by importing a LiDAR derived heightmap into software designed for Minecraft world editing, with streams, sinkholes, and cave systems sculpted by hand. The geology is developed using a geologic map, with rock units extrapolated into the subsurface. The overall dimensions of the virtual world are 2200 m x 2200 m x 256 m.

We designed data packs using custom Java code to repurpose Minecraft items to simulate different geological tools such as GPS, Brunton compasses, field notebooks, and HCl bottles for testing carbonate rocks by reworking tool behaviors, item uses, structures, and GUI elements. We also developed new block textures to represent features of the different stratigraphic units, allowing unique identification of outcrops with the field tools.

Students begin their experience in a tutorial zone that supplies fundamental information about karst and the stratigraphy of the region and walks them through game mechanics and rock identification strategies. The students are then free to explore the world, discovering, identifying, and mapping outcrops, investigating caves systems, and developing their own preferred geologic interpretation of the area. The intended deliverables include their field notebooks, a geologic map, and a report on the likely development of the cave systems.