Brewing Umqombothi: Technicalities of a VR Prototype Merging STEM and South African Intangible Cultural Heritage

This paper describes an interactive embodied learning-based simulation in Virtual Reality that has been designed to disseminate the Intangible Cultural Heritage behind Umqombothi, a traditional South African beer-brewing practice, by instructing both the cultural process and underlying chemistry. The VR simulation includes an authentic beer-making environment based on a South African township and an abstract chemistry environment called the “Microverse”. The paper is limited to literature grounding and details of the technical prototype game and its implicit logging system.