A new education programme in the U.S. is gaining momentum – and our case-for-change in digital twin technology is playing a key role. The initiative, which brings together students, educators and environmental professionals across Wisconsin and Minnesota, is powered behind the scenes by Nextspace’s ontology-driven modelling capabilities.
Bringing data to life in watershed education
In the upper Midwest, communities are grappling with the complex relationship between land-use, agriculture and water quality. In response, educators and regional agencies have turned to interactive simulations and games to translate scientific data into meaningful classroom experiences. These tools enable students to explore how changes in farming practice, phosphorus runoff, soil nutrition and watershed management impact lakes and streams over time.
Across Wisconsin and Minnesota, these simulation-based methods are showing strong uptake in K-12 and higher-education settings. The goal: to move from passive learning to active decision-making.
Nextspace’s role: unified data, deeper understanding
At the heart of this innovation is Nextspace’s platform, which unifies spatial, engineering, geospatial, IoT and enterprise data in a single ontology. By structuring real-world watershed, land-use and agriculture datasets into an interconnected knowledge graph, students and instructors can explore cause-and-effect relationships: how farm nutrient management links to algae blooms, how land-cover choices affect runoff, and how water-quality goal scan be pursued within given budgets.
This unified data environment allows the interactive simulation to go beyond standalone models, offering dynamic “what-if” exploration of watershed decisions. It supports educators as they scaffold learning from conceptual models to real-world deployment.
Impact for educators and students
According to programme organisers, by embedding a live, connected data environment into classroom simulation, students are more engaged and more able to think holistically. They are not simply playing a game – they are operating within a realistic, data-rich environment where choices matter.
For educators, the ability to visualise and manipulate the relationships between farmland, water flow, nutrient load and ecological outcome means better alignment with STEM standards and deeper opportunities for systems thinking.
Why this matters for infrastructure & environment operators
For infrastructure, utility and land-use operators, the education domain acts as a proving ground for digital twin technologies. A data-rich knowledge twin that connects farming, hydrology, soil nutrition, land-use and water quality today can scale to more complex asset and environmental systems tomorrow. The same ontological modelling that underpins Nextspace’s platform for airports, utilities, mining and transport can be adapted for watershed and agrarian systems.
That means better tools for planning, simulation and decision-making – whether the asset is a pump station, a sediment trap, a dairy farm or a lake.
Looking ahead
Nextspace is committed to supporting this sort of integrated, data-driven educational engagement as part of our broader mission to bring “knowledge twins” into infrastructure, manufacturing, utilities and the environment. As students learn to make decisions informed by rich datasets, operators of real-world systems will benefit from a generation comfortable with data-driven thinking, simulation-based planning and cross-domain reasoning.
We look forward to deepening our collaboration in this educational initiative, providing further enhancements to the modelling environment, and exploring how the platform can support even larger landscape and watershed-scale systems in the future.
https://wisconsinwatch.org/2025/10/wisconsin-minnesota-environment-water-farm-student-games-graphics-data/
