A team of chemists and pedagogists from the University of Texas in Dallas are exploring the idea of using the computer game Minecraft as a means to teach chemistry. By doing so, it is hoped that they may also broaden people’s understanding of the chemical industry and the benefits that it brings.
By using the games interactive and problem solving features to set a chemical engineering based challenge, the programmers were able to connect with players in an entertaining way, while also educating them on chemical processes and how chemicals are used to make everyday products.
As the report, published in the journal Nature Chemistry, says, “Imagine a class without lessons, tests and homework, but with missions, quests and teamwork. Video games offer an attractive educational platform because they are designed to be fun and engaging, as opposed to traditional approaches to teaching through lectures and assignments.”
The team, led by Dr. Walter Voit of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, created a ‘mod’ for the game (much as many other Minecraft gamers do), but based the challenges in the game on understanding chemical processes, compounds and elements. This resulted in the development of ‘Polycraft World’, where players must meet goals such as building a pogo stick, by first harvesting and then processing rubber. Or by converting crude oil into jetpack fuel using distillation, chemical synthesis and manufacturing processes. Players are guided by instructions built into the mod, as well as a Wiki Website which advises players on the chemistry and chemical applications needed.
While players are free to return to the Wiki website for advice whenever they need it, experiments showed that players naturally retained information about manufacturing and chemistry simply through game play.
The real challenge in designing the game was in setting the difficulty level correctly. Particularly as the experiments game time lasted for only one hour a week. As Voit said, “If the game is too difficult, people will get frustrated. If it’s too easy, they lose interest. If it’s just right; it’s addicting, it’s engaging, it’s compelling.”
But it seems that the researchers have the level correct, as Dr. Ron Smaldone, an assistant professor of chemistry, who joined the project to give the mod its accuracy as a chemistry teaching tool, tells the University of Texas website, “The demands of the one-hour-a-week class were limited, yet some students went all-out, consuming all this content we put in.”
As Voit explains, “Our goal was to demonstrate the various advantages of presenting educational content in a gaming format.” Adding that, “An immersive, cooperative experience like that of ‘Polycraft World’ may represent the future of education.”
You can find out more about Polycraft World, including the weekly ‘Polycrafter of the Week’ contest, on this YouTube channel.
Meanwhile, the online journal ScienceDaily reports how, “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. 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. “We’ve had complete non-chemists build factories to build polyether ether ketones, which are crazy hard to synthesize.”
On an educational level, the new method is even more appealing, as it enables teachers to easily understand how much information the students have retained. A point that Smaldone highlights when he said, “With traditional teaching methods, I’d walk into a room of several hundred people, and walk out with the same knowledge of their learning methods. With our method, it’s not just the students learning — it’s the teachers as well, monitoring these player interactions. Even in chemistry, this is a big innovation. Watching how they fail to solve a problem can guide you in how to teach better.”
Voit adds to this, saying, “We can measure what each player is doing at every time, how long it takes them to mix chemicals, if they’re tabbing back and forth to our Wiki, and so on. It gives us all this extra information about how people learn. We can use that to improve teaching.”
Whilst the goal of finding out if a computer game can teach chemistry has obviously been met, the research goes far beyond that. As Voit makes clear, “There’s a preconception among some that video games are an inherent evil. Yet in a rudimentary form, we’ve made a group of non-chemistry students mildly proficient in understanding polymer chemistry. I have no doubt that if you scaled that up to more students, it would still work.”
It is hoped that the mod will prove popular, and other variations of its type will be made. If so, then maybe people’s knowledge of the positive side of chemicals will also improve. Given that chemistry is so little understood and the chemical industry as a whole is greatly misunderstood, then perhaps we should all be adding this game to the Christmas list of those we know and love. Or would you rather play it yourself?