Why we drove North

Last week our team drove to Sudbury to meet the teams from the Goodman School of Mines at Laurentian University and their partner MineConnect.

Our team recently started working on a project involving MineOpportunity, a game they run for high school students, and how we help evolve it from an annual live event to something that any teacher in the province can run independently.

Mining is a new vertical for me so I arrived knowing very little about it, but I left with a lot of respect.

What is MineOpportunity?

If you haven’t come across it, MineOpportunity invites students in grades 9 through 12 to a full day of challenges built around real mining work in engineering, geoscience, environmental sustainability, health and safety, business, and community relations.

This isn’t just a lecture with a quiz at the end. It’s a real competition, with teams and a scoreboard, and companies from across the region involved to run the challenges themselves.

What started at Laurentian in 2005 as a way to introduce first-year geology students to careers in the field, has been reshaped over the years for high schoolers. More than 4,000 students across Northern Ontario have played it since, in both English and French, and the next games will be held on October 15th and 16th at Laurentian.

Not only is the game both fun and educational, but students also walk out of that room seeing the industry differently than they did walking in.

A good problem to have

Here’s the constraint. A room can only hold so many students.

The game is built around a specific day, in a specific place, with a bus and a venue and a calendar that has to line up for every school involved. Every year it reaches the students who can get there.

That’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a ceiling. And the students who would most benefit from seeing what a mining career actually looks like are often the ones furthest from the industry, in schools that would be hard pressed to make the trip.

What we’re building, and the part that’s genuinely hard

So we’re digitizing it. Our team is deep in that work right now, on both the visual design and the technical build, so that a teacher in Thunder Bay or Windsor or Ottawa can run MineOpportunity on a Tuesday afternoon without having to book anything or travel anywhere.

The interesting part isn’t what you’d expect. It isn’t the code, it’s the feeling.

A day that runs on energy and noise and a room full of competitive teenagers has to survive the trip into a classroom. The challenges have to still feel like challenges. The industry professionals who bring the day to life have to be present in some form. A teacher who has never set foot in a mine has to be able to pick it up and run it without a week of prep.

Which means the design work and the technical work are not separate tracks here. How a challenge looks and how it’s structured are the same decision. That’s where most of our thinking is going, and it’s the kind of problem I find genuinely fun to sit alongside.

Who was in the room

The first thing that stayed with me from this trip was who we were meeting with.

Mining has a long-standing gender imbalance. It’s also changing, and the people leading this work are a good illustration of why. The clients we met with are women, and they are leaders in their industry.

That matters for the product, not just as a point of principle. If the goal is to show a 15-year-old what a mining career can look like, having the people building it reflect where the industry is going is worth more than any brochure you could print.

Going underground at Dynamic Earth

The second thing was the tour.

Our hosts took us through the underground simulation at Dynamic Earth, which does an honest job of making you feel like you’re in a working mine. Honest enough that my stomach did a small flip on the way down!

Along the way we met engineers who walked us through different corners of the industry, from what the work looks like at depth to what it takes to keep people safe doing it. What came through wasn’t the technology, impressive as it is. It was that these people genuinely love their work and genuinely love doing their job in Sudbury.

That’s hard to fake, and even harder to put in a recruitment ad, BUT a well-built game might just do the trick.

Why mining, and why now

Canadian mining is facing a workforce gap and an image problem at the same time, and the two are related. The industry is far more technical, more digital, and more varied than most students picture. That can’t be fixed with a career pamphlet.

For us, this project sits in familiar territory even… An organization has something valuable that works beautifully in person, but it doesn’t scale. The work is figuring out what has to be preserved and what can be rebuilt. We’ve done versions of that in many other industries including healthcare, insurance, and education, and the discipline transfers.

What doesn’t transfer is the subject knowledge, which is why the partnership matters most. Goodman and MineConnect know this industry and these students better than anyone, while we know how to build better than most.

Thank you so much to the teams at the Goodman School of Mines and MineConnect for their time, the tour, the welcome, and the opportunity to be part of shaping the future generation of mining professionals. More to come as this exciting project continues!

If you have something that works brilliantly in a room and needs to work everywhere else, that’s a problem we love to solve. 247 Labs builds custom platforms across custom software development, UX/UI design, and AI development. Contact 247 Labs to start the conversation.