The best-selling video game of all time - Minecraft - is teaching students about the different minerals and metals mined in Australia and how they are used to make electric cars.

Australian primary school students can now see exactly what it takes to build electric cars through the Mine Solar Car Lab - a three dimensional digital game for Minecraft's education edition launched by the Minerals Council of Australia and the University of Queensland.

In the game players will visit the Institute for Voltaic Propulsion - a research facility full of researchers and massive machines - and then go out and find raw materials used to build the major parts of an electric car.

They have to then correctly insert the minerals into machines and combine the machines into finished components to build a car.

Afterwards the students will be asked to look under their parents' car bonnets to see if they can identify any of the virtual parts in the real world.

The Mine Solar Car Lab virtual environment is accessible on Windows 10, iOS and Android devices.