Gamification for technology-enhanced mineral value chain teaching and learning: serious gaming for geometallurgy concept

Sammanfattning: The concept of gamification is being increasingly explored and applied to offer new teaching or training tools to teachers, students or employees. The field of geology and geometallurgy wasn’t particularly discussed in the topic of gamification. With the objective of creating a synthetic geometallurgical database and a game structure for a gamified simulation of a metal mine, the eastern part of the Malmberget deposit in Sweden was simplified and modelled.The geological model was obtained with assumptions of continuity and proximity, and the lack of data was reconciled using targeted randomization and regular statistics to achieve a smoother and realistic result. A rule book was created to establish the framework that a geometallurgy game should follow,using a slightly adapted version of the Desing thinking framework by the Nielsen group, which consists of elaborating ideas and concepts, implementing them and testing the results before integrating feedbacks to the creation of future elements. The accent was put on obtaining an interactive experience where the player can try various things with a reasonable difficulty, and an accessibility to feedbacks.The purpose of this project is to elaborate a mining simulation game, that could be a valuable tool in the understanding of the interdisciplinary concept of geometallurgy, as well as raising the awareness about sustainable development and how mining can be a part of it. The starting point of this project is another attempt at gamifying geometallurgy by P. Lamberg. The simulation of mineral processing was done using the HSC Sim utilizing 8 different flowsheets that were designed to offer a variety and enable strategic choices. The events occurring at a real mine and beneficiation plant were translated into simple rules. The outcome is a realistic geological and processing model, which through the addition of mining, economics and market strategy, becomes a comprehensive geometallurgy database.