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Build-a Series The Most Popular Serious Games On Spongelab


Via: Spongelab Interactive  A Global Science Community

The Build-a Series are the most popular "Serious Games" on Spongelab  (please find also New At Spongelab: Serious Games For Playing With Science). 

Build-a-Body lets eighth to 12th-graders play transplant surgeon. Gamers piece together the human body's systems by dragging and dropping organs into place.


After plopping the small intestine into the abdomen, for example, you then score more points by figuring out how it joins to the large intestine looping around: “You're building [the body] from the ground up here,” says game designer Jeremy Friedberg of Spongelab Interactive.

The game is a colorful introduction to the human body. But it doesn't stop once students have completed the systems. Build-a-Body also generates an evolving list of “case studies.” Popup windows highlight the symptoms of various illnesses such as celiac disease, and players, now diagnostic physicians, decide what systems those diseases target.

Now Spongelab is adding more educational features to these science games with the new Build-a-Body female version coming out in February.

This school year, they are also bringing out the new Build-a-Plant Games. Build-A-Plant is a drag and drop game to teach students about the structures and substructures within a variety of types of plant.


Reproductive systems are soon being added to the award-winning Build-a-Body, with both male and female versions.

Players can still dive into the classic Build-a-Cell Games to create animal, plant, bacterial and fungal cells.


Performance Tracking Tools

Spongelab is a free learning community for science teachers and students, with interactive content including Serious Games, images, case studies and animations. Teachers can use Spongelab to find interactive content for their lessons, organize it and share it with students or teachers across the globe.

If you are sharing the content with students, you can track their performance through the website.

Spongelab is created by a group of scientists, teachers, animators, artists, and programmers passionate about science education.

It's free, but you need to register for an account.

Spongelab learning platform has grown rapidly and Spongelab's site tour has been redesigned to make it incredibly fast and simple to understand how the site works. It's easy for teachers or student study groups to start using all of Spongelab's class creation features.


Founded in 2007, Spongelab Interactive is a Toronto-based educational gaming design and production company that aims to inspire a new generation of learners to be passionate about the natural and scientific world. 

Recognizing the instructional potential of video gaming, the Spongelab Interactive team, that combines educational, technical and scientific expertise, creates interesting and intuitive online programs that challenge students through discovery-based learning.

Spongelab Interactive is building on these achievements by using educational design with advanced web and gaming technology to produce more Serious Games is biology, in particular for university level students.