A Simulation Game in Mineral Exploration: A Mineral Adventure from Exploration to Exploitation

In recent decades, simulation has emerged as a pivotal educational tool, bolstering scientific knowledge and honing decision-making skills across diverse disciplines. Surgery and flight simulators are well-known tools used to practice and train safely in surgeries and piloting. Meanwhile, the development of simulation games advances in other scientific fields, such as economics, management, engineering, and mathematics. These simulations offer learners a risk-free virtual platform to apply and refine their knowledge, leveraging animations, graphics, and interactive environments to enrich the learning experience. In engineering, while simulation is widely utilized as a powerful training tool for heavy equipment and process handling, the creation of strategy games for educational purposes is less frequent. This gap primarily stems from the challenge of converting complex engineering concepts and theories into a user-friendly yet comprehensive setup that preserves the more difficult aspects. This study adopts a design-based research approach to develop and evaluate an educational simulation game aimed at enhancing probabilistic and spatial reasoning in mineral exploration. The application generates random scenarios, within which users deploy strategies based on their knowledge, while accommodating the randomness of physical phenomena. The simulation game is adopted as an educational tool in the course “Introduction to Mineral Exploration” in the School of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. Additionally, we present the outcomes of game analytics and a qualitative evaluation derived from three workshops at higher education institutions in Greece.