Ecosystem Lab
Follow the energy through food webs, cycles and populations.
Ecosystem Lab covers the core ideas of a high school environmental science or ecology unit. It begins with roles: producers, consumers and decomposers, plus herbivores, carnivores and omnivores, and simple food chains. Level 2 draws a full food web from an arrow list, where each arrow points from the organism that is eaten to the organism that eats it, and students find producers, say who eats whom and decide who loses food if one species disappears.
Energy comes next, with the ten percent rule and drawn energy pyramids that show why food chains stay short. Then come the carbon, nitrogen and water cycles, seven land biomes with climate charts, and primary and secondary succession. The upper levels cover population growth and carrying capacity, then biodiversity, pollution and other human impacts, and a final mix. Every web, pyramid, curve and chart is drawn from the same numbers as its question, and all organisms and scenarios are original.
What children practice
- Sort living things into producers, consumers and decomposers and build a food chain
- Read a food web, name each organism's trophic level and predict who is affected when a species is removed
- Use the ten percent rule to find the energy left at each step of a pyramid
- Trace carbon, nitrogen and water through their cycles and put the processes in order
- Match a biome to its climate chart, and tell primary succession from secondary succession
- Read growth curves, use the rule of 70, and explain carrying capacity, limiting factors, keystone species and the causes and effects of pollution
Levels
- Roles and chains: Producers, consumers, decomposers
- Food webs: Who eats whom
- Energy flow: The ten percent rule
- Cycles: Carbon, nitrogen, water
- Biomes and succession: Climate and change
- Populations: Growth and limits
- Biodiversity and people: Species, pollution, solutions
- Course mix: Everything
How it works
- The eight levels move from single food chains to whole ecosystems, and level 8 mixes every round type, including webs that call for the ten percent rule.
- Boards vary from round to round: pick an answer, tap organisms in a drawing, sort cards into bins, match pairs, put steps in order or type a number on a keypad.
- Getting five answers right and finishing a brief practice timer opens the following level, which keeps the order of ideas intact.
- A miss brings a prompt to try again, and the hint button offers up to three clues. Energy is given in kilocalories or kilojoules, with the units shown on the cards.
Best for: A good fit for grades 9 to 12 in biology, ecology or environmental science, and for review before a unit test or a final.
Tip for parents: Pick any meal and ask your child to trace it back to a producer, naming each link and where the energy was lost along the way. If they can, the idea of a food chain has landed.
Questions parents ask
Does the game tell students what to think about environmental policy?
No. The human impact rounds only define terms, causes and effects, such as what eutrophication is or why an invasive species spreads. No question recommends a policy or takes a side.
Are the food webs and numbers taken from real studies?
No. The organisms, populations and energy values are made up for practice so that the arithmetic comes out cleanly. Biome climates are described only as general, well-settled approximations.
How are the food webs drawn?
Each web is built from a list of arrows that run from the eaten organism to its eater, and the picture follows that list exactly. Because every organism sits in one tier, each one has a single trophic level that students can read off.
Ready to try it?
Ecosystem Lab is free with a parent account. A parent adds a child profile, and the child's progress is saved.