Ready Player One - Inspiring the Next Generation of Engineers and Scientists with FME and Minecraft

The UN Sustainable development goal 4 aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.’ We are always looking for new ways to inspire the next generation of engineers in the engineering sector. Recently Atkins UK began working closely with the Digital Engineering Technology and Innovation (DETI) Inspire team at the University of West of England to explore accurate spatial data as a digital twin, delivered via the popular game Minecraft. The Atkins Geospatial Team built a custom FME process to convert Ordnance Survey data into a to-scale Minecraft world, allowing highly detailed local communities to be created – the UK’s wild west in Minecraft. Through in-game interaction with this recreated Bristol, children from local communities can explore the familiar parts of their community in a new way, using them to frame engineering challenges, piquing their interest, and giving them the power to reshape where they live to enable a net-zero future. “Giving young people access to these places and the power to reshape them, even if it is just in Minecraft, offers them the opportunity to imagine their world as being different from what it is now. We hope that planting the idea that we can have some control over our environment will lead some young people to think about the relevance of design and engineering to their lives, and then perhaps on to thinking of themselves as designers and engineers of the future.” - Liz Lister, STEM Ambassador Hub West England.