Magma Pop: The Video Game That Teaches Students How Magmas Evolve

Teaching university students how magmas evolve is one of the hardest jobs in geoscience education. Fractional crystallization, the process by which minerals sequentially crystallize out of a cooling magma chamber and progressively change the chemistry of the remaining melt, is foundational to understanding igneous rocks, yet students routinely memorize the sequence without grasping the underlying chemistry. A team at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand believes it has found a better way, and it comes in the form of a colorful, fast-paced video game called Magma Pop. In a new study published in the journal Geoscience Communication, Sriparna Saha and colleagues document three years of iterative design, classroom testing, and revision that transformed a simple game prototype into a teaching tool that, when paired with a classic hands-on exercise, appears to move students from rote memorization to genuine mechanistic insight.

The starting point for the project was a long-standing classroom activity known as the M&M’s magma chamber lab, originally designed by Karl Wirth at Macalester College. In that exercise, students use different colored candies to represent the major elements in a magma, including silicon, titanium, aluminium, iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium, and potassium, expressed as oxides. As the simulated magma cools in a series of steps, students physically remove crystals in the order dictated by Bowen’s Reaction Series, tally the changing chemistry of the minerals removed and the residual melt, and plot the trends in a spreadsheet. The activity has been used widely for two decades, but the Canterbury instructors noticed a persistent problem: students became so absorbed in counting candies and filling in cells that they missed the conceptual point of the entire exercise.

Magma Pop was conceived as a digital companion that would offload the arithmetic and let students focus on the science. The first version required no prior experience and ran on ordinary classroom PCs. Its opening level, titled The Magma Neophyte, presents players with a magma chamber filled with floating ions of silicon, titanium, aluminium, iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium, potassium, and, crucially, oxygen. To make a mineral such as forsterite, players must select two magnesium ions, one silicon ion, and four oxygen ions. When the formula is correct, the newly formed crystal sinks to the bottom of the chamber, a direct visual metaphor for gravitational settling. Across three sublevels, students practice building forsterite, fayalite, diopside, anorthite, albite, quartz, ilmenite, and magnetite, with an on-screen formula panel providing support for beginners.

The second level, The Magma Dealer, raised the stakes considerably. A temperature panel appeared on screen, and as the simulated chamber cooled from temperatures above 1300 degrees Celsius, the list of minerals the player needed to crystallize kept growing, mirroring the way Bowen’s Reaction Series unfolds in a real cooling magma. Oxygen was dropped from the gameplay so that players had to combine only the cations, forcing them to internalize the mineral formulae rather than read them off a panel. The designers also added gold and water to the magma chamber as incompatible elements, species that fit into no crystallizing mineral and therefore accumulate in the residual melt. Gold served as an analogue for ore-forming trace elements that can reach economically significant concentrations in evolved magmas, while water illustrated how volatile enrichment in late-stage melts lowers viscosity, destabilizes minerals, and ultimately drives more explosive eruptions.

The first formal evaluation, conducted in July 2020 with students who had already completed the M&M’s lab, was sobering. Forty-one students answered a multiple-choice concept question before and after playing, and the results showed no measurable increase in conceptual learning, although the researchers acknowledged that the assessment instrument itself may have been flawed, since the question sheet did not clearly state that multiple answers could be correct and students gravitated toward silicon-related answers emphasized in lectures. Five focus group sessions involving 27 students, however, yielded rich qualitative feedback. Students praised the visual clarity of the game, noting that crystals dropping to the chamber floor gave a good representation of the melt changing composition, and several reported that repeated play was helping them remember mineral formulae they would otherwise have struggled to recall.

The criticism was just as instructive. Many students found the later levels moved too fast, leaving no time to think about the changing composition chart in the bottom corner of the screen, which most never noticed. Others wanted the formula panel to remain visible throughout, a warning that formulas would disappear in level two, brighter visuals, differentiated ion sizes, and a narrating character to make the experience more personal. Several suggested reflective pop-ups between rounds, such as drag-and-drop formula quizzes, to consolidate learning rather than letting players coast on the cheat sheet. The team took the feedback seriously and rebuilt the game. Version 2 introduced a tutorial level called Magma Academy, guided by an animated character named Rua, who explained the objectives and the underlying science, made the formula panel permanently visible, added a point system to reward correct decisions, and renamed the gameplay levels Crystal Collector and Crystal Builder.

Version 3, tested in subsequent classrooms, went further in aligning the game with the conceptual goals of the M&M’s lab. The Magma Dealer level was replaced by Magma Crystallizer, in which students explicitly explore how magma chemistry evolves from mafic through intermediate to felsic compositions as cooling proceeds. The gameplay screen was labeled with magma types based on the silica content of the residual melt, and the expanded Magma Academy tutorial included built-in quizzes with graphs depicting how each elemental oxide changes as fractional crystallization progresses, directly scaffolding the questions students must answer in the written lab. The home screen now displays the learning objectives up front, giving players a clear sense of what they should be watching for as they play.

The evaluation of version 3 shifted from focus groups to five-minute semi-structured interviews with roughly 15 undergraduate volunteers, conducted before and after gameplay. The analysis revealed three consistent conceptual shifts. First, students moved from general recognition to mechanistic clarity: before playing, most could recite that olivine crystallizes first and pyroxene follows, but afterward they could articulate why, with one student observing that olivine’s formation removed iron from the melt, leaving less of it later. Second, students integrated Bowen’s Reaction Series visually rather than treating it as an abstract list, with several reporting that the game clarified questions they had carried through the course. Third, the repetitive ion-matching mechanics reinforced recall of mineral formulae, with students who described themselves as unable to memorize chemical compositions reporting that selecting the right elements and quantities in the game made the formulae stick.

The Canterbury team is careful not to oversell the game as a replacement for hands-on work. Their conclusion is that Magma Pop works best as a complement to the M&M’s lab: the lab emphasizes quantitative data collection and trend analysis, while the game supplies real-time conceptual feedback and pattern reinforcement, and the formula recall built through gameplay transfers directly to the stoichiometric and spreadsheet demands of the written exercise. Together, the two activities moved students from a descriptive understanding of fractional crystallization to a mechanistic one, in which they could explain not just the order of mineral formation but how the early removal of compatible ions like iron and magnesium reshapes the evolving melt. The study also offers a candid case study in educational game design, showing that a first prototype with genuine pedagogical promise can fail its learning goals if pacing, reflection, and assessment are not aligned, and that iterative, feedback-driven revision is what turns an engaging distraction into an effective teaching instrument. Magma Pop version 3 is now playable online in modern browsers, and the team hopes its design lessons will encourage other geoscience educators to take serious games seriously.

Subject of Research: Development and classroom evaluation of the educational game Magma Pop for teaching fractional crystallization in undergraduate geoscience

Article Title: Development and Iterative Design of an educational game “Magma Pop” to teach undergraduate fractional crystallization concepts

Article References: Saha, S., Kennedy, B., Nichols, A. R. L., Brogt, E., Harris, N., & Hoermann, S. (2026). Development and Iterative Design of an educational game “Magma Pop” to teach undergraduate fractional crystallization concepts. Geoscience Communication, 9(1), 127-138. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-127-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-127-2026

Keywords: Magma Pop, serious games, fractional crystallization, Bowen's Reaction Series, geoscience education, mineral formulae, magma chamber, game-based learning, volcanology, undergraduate teaching, iterative design, University of Canterbury