CRYSTALMINER: an OSI hackathon project teaching crystallography via 23 Minecraft-like symmetry worlds with an AI tutor
CatAstro_Piyush · x · 2026-10-23
CRYSTALMINER, a project from the OSI Hackathon, turns crystallography into a first-person Minecraft-style game. It features 23 symmetry worlds where every block a player places is copied by all operations of that world's symmetry group, teaching concepts like 2-fold/3-fold axes, mirror planes, inversion centers and unit cells by direct manipulation.
The game includes a guide, quizzes, progress tracking and "Prism", an built-in AI tutor you can ask questions. It's playable in the browser at crystalminer.online (desktop, keyboard + mouse), with source code and a demo video available.
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