Presenting at SME MineXchange 2026 was an opportunity to bring our mining education work to a broader technical and outreach audience.
The session focused on advancing mining education through AI-powered Virtual Labs: a growing ecosystem of interactive stations designed to make mining concepts more accessible, engaging, and classroom-ready.
The ecosystem
The Virtual Labs direction includes stations around ore formation, metallurgy, reclamation, exploration, filtration, lunar mining, and interactive student support.
A key part of the vision is a school-specialized AI chat layer embedded into the learning experience. The goal is to use curated sources, provenance, and adaptive guidance to help students ask better questions and receive context-aware explanations.
The product challenge
The challenge is not only technical accuracy. The challenge is experience design: students need hints, teachers need trust, and the system needs to support learning without becoming a black box.
What I learned
A strong education product does not replace the educator. It gives the educator a stronger environment to teach inside.