Spongelab Build a Cell: the cell biology game launched at NSTA 2011

Spongelab Biology introduced Build A Cell at the NSTA 2011 National Conference in San Francisco, which ran from March 10 to 13 with the company at booth 943. Students build an animal, plant, bacterial and fungal cell and watch each one come alive, so the similarities and differences between the four can be compared side by side.

Players learn about each organelle and then apply that knowledge to real-life case studies. Teachers with an existing Spongelab Biology account could open the game directly, and a free trial was offered for classes that had not signed up. It followed History of Biology, an earlier Spongelab game about solving mysteries from the history of the field, and teachers reached both through the same Spongelab Biology service. A listing on the Science Game Center describes Spongelab Build a Cell as a free, high-school-level web game in which students drag and drop organelles and their substructures into place.

Spongelab Interactive was founded in 2007 by Jeremy Friedberg, Reg Bronskill and Andrea Bielecki and is based in Toronto, Ontario, according to its Wikipedia entry. The company's other titles include History of Biology, a browser-based scavenger hunt through key figures and discoveries, and Genomics Digital Lab, a simulation game about basic biology. Another game, Build-a-Body, in which students place organs on the human body, received an honourable mention in the 2011 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.

The Science Game Center listing for Build a Cell carries player reviews from September 2013 to May 2014 and no expert reviews. It gives no release date for the game itself.

The spongelab.com address that carried the game and its sign-up pages no longer leads to a website, so no official page for Spongelab Build a Cell could be opened in November 2026. The Wikipedia entry, last edited in September 2026, still lists the company as active, but it does not mention Build a Cell and gives no new web address for it.

Without an official page that offers the game, its current status stays unconfirmed. The third-party listing still describes it as free and playable on the developer's website, but that description was supplied by the developer and carries no date.