"Miners in the Space" will help you study Materials Science (video)

The idea of creating the game appeared during the training of game practice at University of Tyumen: 18 university teachers, including associate professor Aelita Nikulina, completed such advanced training in 2020. During the training, it was necessary to come up with a real game — that's how appeared the concept of "Miners" highly appreciated by the experts.

At the next stage, Aelita Nikulina became the applicant for the students project within NSTU NETI project training and together with the students began to develop the game concept. "Miners in the Space" is designed to facilitate studying the academic discipline Materials Science while playing the game. The project team had a task of developing the game design, programming work, and debugging the functionality.

Now the game has more than 50 fascinating locations, a variety of characters - from the inhabitants of asteroids to highly developed humanoid races - as well as equipment for mining different types of ores, which can be updated and purchased, and the function of instant receipt of money from the sale of ore. A playing miner gets all "treasures" by answering Materials Science course questions. If three answers are wrong, the game starts again.

There is no doubt that "Miners" is one of the first technical learning games. The series of questions is still limited, but the number of locations leaves the ground to substantially upgrade the game in terms of Materials science and other special subjects in the future.

Natalia Plotnikova, Head of Education Strategy Department, NSTU NETI, believes that the development and implementation of game practice can be a priority of the project activity and the beginning of new teaching technique promotion at our university. Besides, there are two big faculties that train IT-specialists at our university and for them, the development of a learning game is a good practice.

"The developed version of "Miners in the Space" was created not by IT-specialists, but by the students of Mechanical Engineering and Technologies Faculty. I think that forming an inter divisional project team of creating learning games can be one more competitive advantage of NSTU. It can enrich teachers' skills of distant learning", said Plotnikova .

As for "Miners in the Space", the project activity of upgrading game locations continues this term. The game is to be implemented in the MET educational process on Materials Science.