About the Project
The project (we currently have settled on Disease Detectives as a name, it changes often), has been curated by myself since 2020, and has spun out of an undergraduate student project which was challenged with building something interesting in Minecraft that helped explain a biological concept.
Since then, students have taken the initial idea - can we show how infections spread in Minecraft? - and grown it into a successful public engagement workshop, and now into an internationally used undergraduate teaching resource.
The project (we currently have settled on Disease Detectives as a name, it changes often), has been curated by myself since 2020, and has spun out of an undergraduate student project which was challenged with building something interesting in Minecraft that helped explain a biological concept.
Since then, students have taken the initial idea - can we show how infections spread in Minecraft? - and grown it into a successful public engagement workshop, and now into an internationally used undergraduate teaching resource.
Siobhan (2019 - 20) Epidemicraft
Without Siobhan there would be no Disease Detectives. They had the daunting challenge of building something in a video game, which we had only a bit of experience in, for their undergraduate dissertation which makes up a major part of their final grade. Looking back that is a rather insane scenario, but that was the one Siobhan took on and tackled with enthusiasm and a lot of hard work.
Siobhan was interested in infectious diseases, and decided on looking at whether Minecraft could represent how they spread in a way which was visually interesting as well as accurate. To do this they not only had to learn how to write code in the game, but also to write comparison model code in Python, a language they did not have much experience in either.
What they produced was two models in the game that showed how diseases spread in different ways. The first, a lattice model format, was very close to how the Python model worked, and showed diseases spreading between different squares in a grid. It works like a SIR model, the graphs with susceptible, infected and recovery rates we all saw plenty of in the pandemic.
The second one is the one that really spawned what followed. It was a little prototype developed towards the end of the dissertation that tried to show diseases spreading using the in-game people, called villagers. It involved a lot of trial and error and understanding how the game converted villagers into different “jobs”, which gives them distinct appearances that Siobhan thought could be used to visually distinguish infected villagers from those that are healthy.
Going further with this had to wait though, as there was a PhD to write and a (admittedly rather apt) pandemic situation putting a hold on a lot of things!
Without Siobhan there would be no Disease Detectives. They had the daunting challenge of building something in a video game, which we had only a bit of experience in, for their undergraduate dissertation which makes up a major part of their final grade. Looking back that is a rather insane scenario, but that was the one Siobhan took on and tackled with enthusiasm and a lot of hard work.
Siobhan was interested in infectious diseases, and decided on looking at whether Minecraft could represent how they spread in a way which was visually interesting as well as accurate. To do this they not only had to learn how to write code in the game, but also to write comparison model code in Python, a language they did not have much experience in either.
What they produced was two models in the game that showed how diseases spread in different ways. The first, a lattice model format, was very close to how the Python model worked, and showed diseases spreading between different squares in a grid. It works like a SIR model, the graphs with susceptible, infected and recovery rates we all saw plenty of in the pandemic.
The second one is the one that really spawned what followed. It was a little prototype developed towards the end of the dissertation that tried to show diseases spreading using the in-game people, called villagers. It involved a lot of trial and error and understanding how the game converted villagers into different “jobs”, which gives them distinct appearances that Siobhan thought could be used to visually distinguish infected villagers from those that are healthy.
Going further with this had to wait though, as there was a PhD to write and a (admittedly rather apt) pandemic situation putting a hold on a lot of things!
Perrin (2022 - 2024) Plaguecraft | Disease Scotland
Perrin comes into the frame a couple years later. After working on another Minecraft project around Field Zoology with Prof Tom Little, we felt it would be quite cool to offer up a student dissertation using Minecraft in Biology, and see how it would evolve. I pointed out I had this really intriguing idea from Siobhan’s work that we could ask someone to build into something we might use in public engagement.
After asking Siobhan’s permission, we posted a project to “refin[e] and enhance[e] this to produce a multi-use tool to both teach and communicate science to several different audiences”. Ambitious? Yes. But something I find time and again is that the ambitious projects attract people up for a challenge and not afraid to take on something completely new.
Where Perrin took the project in 12 weeks went beyond what I honestly thought was feasible with the game, and in the time. It took me much longer than 12 weeks to fully understand it all myself! They took the original SIR idea and expanded it to include people ‘exposed’ to the disease, but not yet infectious. Not only that, but they made the model stochastic (so each time you run it the outcome differs like a real outbreak), worked out how to make multiple versions for different in-game villages, and also how to make all these various different parameters adjustable and measurable.
What this resulted in was a set of infectious disease models in Minecraft that taught be a lot about this type of modelling, used coding methods in the game I’d never heard of, and was exactly the kind of thing we needed to build something for multiple different audiences.
Perrin comes into the frame a couple years later. After working on another Minecraft project around Field Zoology with Prof Tom Little, we felt it would be quite cool to offer up a student dissertation using Minecraft in Biology, and see how it would evolve. I pointed out I had this really intriguing idea from Siobhan’s work that we could ask someone to build into something we might use in public engagement.
After asking Siobhan’s permission, we posted a project to “refin[e] and enhance[e] this to produce a multi-use tool to both teach and communicate science to several different audiences”. Ambitious? Yes. But something I find time and again is that the ambitious projects attract people up for a challenge and not afraid to take on something completely new.
Where Perrin took the project in 12 weeks went beyond what I honestly thought was feasible with the game, and in the time. It took me much longer than 12 weeks to fully understand it all myself! They took the original SIR idea and expanded it to include people ‘exposed’ to the disease, but not yet infectious. Not only that, but they made the model stochastic (so each time you run it the outcome differs like a real outbreak), worked out how to make multiple versions for different in-game villages, and also how to make all these various different parameters adjustable and measurable.
What this resulted in was a set of infectious disease models in Minecraft that taught be a lot about this type of modelling, used coding methods in the game I’d never heard of, and was exactly the kind of thing we needed to build something for multiple different audiences.
Kate (2022 - ) Disease Detectives
For a time I was a public engagement postdoctoral researcher working with the 4273pi project. This meant travelling a lot on trains across Scotland, usually with volunteers to help run the workshops. One such trip was to Port Glasgow, a fair distance from Edinburgh! On that particular trip I was being assisted by Maria Fanourgiaki, one of Biology’s public engagement officers, and Kate. Kate was still early in her PhD, but had been thinking about ways to develop something with Maria to engage the public with viral mutations and the type of geographical data we collect that helps inform researchers how a virus is spreading and mutating.
Perrin hadn’t quite started yet, but on the train back the seeds for Disease Detectives were sown. I spoke about Perrin’s upcoming project and my work in Minecraft more generally, and we all thought it would be interesting to give it a go to put these ideas all together. And so a parallel project ran alongside Perrin’s work, where Kate and Maria constructed a wonderful and fun introduction to genetic mutations, how to spot them, and what they mean in terms of viruses and our research into them.
Perrin’s work would fit in we’d hoped, and thankfully it became very quickly clear we had something that could be converted into something suitable for the workshop. My memory is hazy on this point, but I think it was me who suggested we adapt what Perrin had developed into a scale version of Scotland. I know at least I provided the scaled down map of Scotland for that purpose!
Thanks to some funding we received from the Darwin Trust, plus a joint grant from Research Data Scotland (along with Science Skills Academy), we were able to both keep Perrin on for a few months to make something bespoke in this Scotland setting for the workshop, as well as plan our activities to trial out the workshop.
These activities led us across Scotland. We’ve been to schools, Newton Rooms, science festivals, even Belladrum music festival! And importantly for me too, it’s the same workshop just adapted slightly for different ages. Our world works just as well for a 5 year old Minecraft fanatic as it does for the slightly bewildered parent who was dragged along to watch. And for someone doing their Highers it’s a way into a topic that unexpectedly lets them talk about games in class as well as biology, with people who think both are interesting.
For a time I was a public engagement postdoctoral researcher working with the 4273pi project. This meant travelling a lot on trains across Scotland, usually with volunteers to help run the workshops. One such trip was to Port Glasgow, a fair distance from Edinburgh! On that particular trip I was being assisted by Maria Fanourgiaki, one of Biology’s public engagement officers, and Kate. Kate was still early in her PhD, but had been thinking about ways to develop something with Maria to engage the public with viral mutations and the type of geographical data we collect that helps inform researchers how a virus is spreading and mutating.
Perrin hadn’t quite started yet, but on the train back the seeds for Disease Detectives were sown. I spoke about Perrin’s upcoming project and my work in Minecraft more generally, and we all thought it would be interesting to give it a go to put these ideas all together. And so a parallel project ran alongside Perrin’s work, where Kate and Maria constructed a wonderful and fun introduction to genetic mutations, how to spot them, and what they mean in terms of viruses and our research into them.
Perrin’s work would fit in we’d hoped, and thankfully it became very quickly clear we had something that could be converted into something suitable for the workshop. My memory is hazy on this point, but I think it was me who suggested we adapt what Perrin had developed into a scale version of Scotland. I know at least I provided the scaled down map of Scotland for that purpose!
Thanks to some funding we received from the Darwin Trust, plus a joint grant from Research Data Scotland (along with Science Skills Academy), we were able to both keep Perrin on for a few months to make something bespoke in this Scotland setting for the workshop, as well as plan our activities to trial out the workshop.
These activities led us across Scotland. We’ve been to schools, Newton Rooms, science festivals, even Belladrum music festival! And importantly for me too, it’s the same workshop just adapted slightly for different ages. Our world works just as well for a 5 year old Minecraft fanatic as it does for the slightly bewildered parent who was dragged along to watch. And for someone doing their Highers it’s a way into a topic that unexpectedly lets them talk about games in class as well as biology, with people who think both are interesting.
Zimo (2026) Disease Detectives: China
On moving into my new role teaching between campuses in Edinburgh and Haining, I wanted to explore if there was any opportunity to translate the Java Edition worlds I curate into the Chinese version of Minecraft, which I knew very little about. Zimo’s project was directly tasked with exploring just how feasible this would be, which in the end turned out to be much easier than we both expected!
[Skip this paragraph if you’re not Minecraft obsessed] It turns out the China Edition runs on Forge using a slightly older version to the International version of Java Edition Minecraft. In all other respects though it works the same (although Bedrock is extremely different). The only tricky things are finding the folder space and needing special UUID formats for the world names.
A big advantage in China is that Minecraft is free to play, so anyone can play the game so long as they have a Windows or Linux PC/laptop. Zimo’s work showed the world translated just fine, although we need to be very aware of the different version and make sure all the code in the game is compatible. Also all words on signs have a habit of vanishing. But that aside, the world works fine, and the infection mechanics seem to transfer over without issue.
One aim now is to build on this finding and have someone develop a scaled model of the Zhejiang University International campus in Minecraft, which we can use to replicate the Disease Detectives experience but in a more familiar setting for students there. So watch this space for that!
Another is to explore just how useful this model might be for researchers. There are certain advantages to this method that may lend itself to more than just being a public engagement or teaching tool. It may amount to nothing, but with this project who knows?
On moving into my new role teaching between campuses in Edinburgh and Haining, I wanted to explore if there was any opportunity to translate the Java Edition worlds I curate into the Chinese version of Minecraft, which I knew very little about. Zimo’s project was directly tasked with exploring just how feasible this would be, which in the end turned out to be much easier than we both expected!
[Skip this paragraph if you’re not Minecraft obsessed] It turns out the China Edition runs on Forge using a slightly older version to the International version of Java Edition Minecraft. In all other respects though it works the same (although Bedrock is extremely different). The only tricky things are finding the folder space and needing special UUID formats for the world names.
A big advantage in China is that Minecraft is free to play, so anyone can play the game so long as they have a Windows or Linux PC/laptop. Zimo’s work showed the world translated just fine, although we need to be very aware of the different version and make sure all the code in the game is compatible. Also all words on signs have a habit of vanishing. But that aside, the world works fine, and the infection mechanics seem to transfer over without issue.
One aim now is to build on this finding and have someone develop a scaled model of the Zhejiang University International campus in Minecraft, which we can use to replicate the Disease Detectives experience but in a more familiar setting for students there. So watch this space for that!
Another is to explore just how useful this model might be for researchers. There are certain advantages to this method that may lend itself to more than just being a public engagement or teaching tool. It may amount to nothing, but with this project who knows?
Teaching Versions
In about November 2025 I starting adapting the Disease Detectives variant by myself to align with the learning outcomes of two 3rd year undergraduate courses at the University of Edinburgh. The first is in the Epidemiology week of Infection 3 at the Edinburgh-Zhejiang Institute, where I teach. The other has been developed for the Infection and Immunity 3 course in Biological Sciences.
It was the latter course that started this new direction off. One of the course team, Dr Patricia Castro-Sanchez, went with us for one of the Disease Detectives workshops in a nearby school, and wondered if the model could be adapted for teaching undergraduates. Given I was just moving into a new role, one in which I could feasibly offer to teach with the Minecraft world also, it made sense to really get stuck into this as a challenge and see once again how far we could take this project.
Patricia and her team’s request have led to a host of new data and features being added to the game, including DNA sequence analysis, outbreak interventions and more realistic demographics. The intention is to keep deepening and adding features to enable students to use the world as a one-stop reference point for a host of epidemiological and immunological concepts, and to feed this back into the public engagement version to offer more variety in workshops depending on the audience.
We’ve tested the workshop now on several students, in both courses, and had some really positive feedback and ideas for future directions and how to integrate it more into the course curricula. It’s something I’m very excited to keep working on, not least because it’s really brushed up my Minecraft coding skills!
In about November 2025 I starting adapting the Disease Detectives variant by myself to align with the learning outcomes of two 3rd year undergraduate courses at the University of Edinburgh. The first is in the Epidemiology week of Infection 3 at the Edinburgh-Zhejiang Institute, where I teach. The other has been developed for the Infection and Immunity 3 course in Biological Sciences.
It was the latter course that started this new direction off. One of the course team, Dr Patricia Castro-Sanchez, went with us for one of the Disease Detectives workshops in a nearby school, and wondered if the model could be adapted for teaching undergraduates. Given I was just moving into a new role, one in which I could feasibly offer to teach with the Minecraft world also, it made sense to really get stuck into this as a challenge and see once again how far we could take this project.
Patricia and her team’s request have led to a host of new data and features being added to the game, including DNA sequence analysis, outbreak interventions and more realistic demographics. The intention is to keep deepening and adding features to enable students to use the world as a one-stop reference point for a host of epidemiological and immunological concepts, and to feed this back into the public engagement version to offer more variety in workshops depending on the audience.
We’ve tested the workshop now on several students, in both courses, and had some really positive feedback and ideas for future directions and how to integrate it more into the course curricula. It’s something I’m very excited to keep working on, not least because it’s really brushed up my Minecraft coding skills!