The Voltaic Propulsion Lab

Guiding Ideas

Electric cars form a small but significant percentage of vehicles currently on the road in the developed world. As battery efficiencies increase and fuel prices rise, the number of electric cars in use is set to rise rapidly over the coming decades. By introducing students to a modern electric car in a collaborative, interactive way, this scenario aims to excite them about the way electric cars are built, and possibly spur interest in learning more about this rapidly-changing industry.

In this lesson, students will visit the fictional Institute for Voltaic Propulsion; a fantastical research facility full of researchers and enormous machines. They will be tasked with mining and collecting raw materials used to build major parts of an electric car, then correctly inserting them into machines that will combine them into the finished components. In this way, the Lab acts like an abstracted version of an automobile factory.

At each stage students are able to observe the completed parts of the vehicle and speak to NPCs that guide them in finding resources, as well as providing general trivia.

Students will be required to work together in small groups to accomplish this collaborative task. Some materials can simply be retrieved from storerooms, whilst others must be mined, refined and constructed using tools and facilities within the Lab, and the surrounding Minecraft environment. Some of these tasks involve: using pickaxes to mine minerals; furnaces to smelt metal, bake terracotta, and convert sand into glass; crafting tables to construct tools and metal components; and even using enchanted, magical pickaxes to retrieve and extract solid blocks of ice from an iceberg.

To complete the car, every part must be completed first. Students have opportunities to share their knowledge and collected resources, and work together to help each other. The reveal of the completed car is dramatic, and should make for a satisfying conclusion to the lesson.

This scenario has been lovingly built by the University of Queensland, Australia, with the generous support of Mining Education Australia, and the Minerals Council of Australia. Determining strategies for managing resource scarcity and sustainability are key issues over the coming years and decades, and this perspective is an important one to introduce to students who might someday consider a career in engineering. Regardless, by teaching students about the raw materials that go into creating a single car, the researchers hope to encourage students to consider the resources that go into other everyday objects they may otherwise be taken for granted.