Concepts you can play with.
Small interactive diagrams and simulations — built to make abstract systems behave on screen, so the idea lands before the vocabulary does.
Simulations are interactive widgets you poke; Excalidraw diagrams pan and zoom, download to your own board, or embed as a live iframe in Notion. Grouped below by subject.
Environmental Systems & Societies
Systems, feedback and the human–environment interactions behind the ESS guide.
A tree as a system
Sort the 39 components of a tree system — inputs, stores, outputs, flows and processes — then get your own whiteboard copy of the tree and draw the links between them (IB ESS 1.2.1–1.2.2).
A pond as a system
Nineteen measured components of a pond, sorted into storages, inputs, outputs and the flows within. The diagram draws itself to scale as you go, so the sediment really is 400 times the carnivores, and the pond turns out to be quietly filling itself in (IB ESS 1.2.3–1.2.8, 1.2.17).
Feedback loops
Toggle between a balancing loop (fox & rabbit) and a reinforcing loop (ice, albedo & temperature) to see how systems self-regulate or amplify change.
A British temperate woodland food web
Oak to caterpillar to blue tit to sparrowhawk: the woodland's producers, primary, secondary and tertiary consumers, saprotrophs and parasites drawn as one annotated food web, with every arrow pointing the way energy and carbon compounds flow (IB ESS 2.2.5, 2.2.9–2.2.11, 2.2.15).
Protected area design
Sketch a reserve network for a rare predator — toggle buffer zones, surrounding land use and wildlife corridors, then assemble a Paper 2 answer from the linked brainstorm cards.
Eutrophication: a systems model
Nutrients in, phytoplankton bloom, decomposition strips the dissolved oxygen and aquatic life suffocates — the positive feedback loop drawn as a stock-and-flow diagram, with green/red arrows for the polarity of each link (IB ESS 4.4.5–4.4.6).
Geography
Places, processes and global interactions mapped for the DP Geography course.
The BILLY bookcase: global supply chain
Follow IKEA's BILLY from European forests to 500+ stores — four supply-chain stages annotated with the TNC strategies behind them (IB Geography HL 4.2.5).
Coca-Cola in Switzerland: global supply chain
The opposite logic to BILLY — secret concentrate travels the world while water, sugar and the rPET bottle stay Swiss. Franchise power, localised production and a glocal Swiss pitch (IB Geography HL 4.2.5).
Crack the Demographic Transition
A scored matching game — read four anonymous birth-rate, death-rate and population graphs and drag each country onto the one you think it is. One well-known country per stage (2–5), 4/6/10-round sessions, identical axes (IB Geography 1.2.1).
Kiva microloans: fund a loan
Explore the world's real microfinance loans by development need, borrower and sector — then, as a class, propose loans and dot-vote on which one to fund. Social entrepreneurship for human development (IB Geography 5.1.5).
Theory of Knowledge
Ways of knowing made tangible enough to poke at.
Tell us what abstract idea your students keep bouncing off — we're always looking for the next one to build.