Interactive learning through exploration
VariableVista is a growing collection of interactive models, simulations, and investigations designed to help students explore systems, discover patterns, and explain cause-and-effect relationships.
Model Library
Change conditions, observe outcomes, collect data, and explain what happened.
Manage a digital fish hatchery and investigate how feeding, aeration, temperature, water exchange, crowding, oxygen, and waste affect fish growth and survival.
Build a heat-resilient city by balancing roads, buildings, trees, green spaces, water, shade, construction costs, and the urban heat-island effect.
Build a 50-year electricity plan for Oregon. Meet rising demand, phase out fossil fuels, and balance reliability, land use, climate impact, and lifetime cost.
Build a 10 × 10 landscape, place an ignition point, and test how fire danger, drought, temperature, wind, and terrain affect the direction and rate of wildfire spread.
Explore how aquifer material, hydraulic gradient, recharge, pumping, confining layers, and contaminant properties affect groundwater flow and plume movement.
Explore a working hydraulic clock inspired by Bernard Gitton’s water clock at NEMO Science Museum. Observe how reservoirs, pendulum motion, siphons, minute chambers, and hour globes work together to measure time.
Explore Washington’s registered electric vehicle population using an interactive GIS map. Filter the data, investigate geographic patterns, and compare two counties using real state registration records.
Investigate how sea otters, sea urchins, kelp growth, ocean temperature, storms, and protection can reshape a coastal ecosystem over thirty years.
Analyze seismic wave data, calculate the distance to an earthquake, triangulate its epicenter, and use hazard patterns to help a community prepare for future earthquakes.
Scan a simplified Pacific transect from Papua New Guinea to Peru, construct a depth profile, identify ocean-floor features, and use evidence from ridges and trenches to predict plate motion.
How It Works
Adjust one or more variables using sliders, buttons, and interactive controls.
Watch the system respond through animations, measurements, graphs, and visual changes.
Run different scenarios and compare how changing conditions affects the outcome.
Use evidence from the model to explain patterns, relationships, and cause-and-effect connections.
Built for Classrooms
VariableVista models are designed to support prediction, investigation, data analysis, systems thinking, and scientific explanation.
Keep temperature, feeding, water exchange, and starting population constant. Change only the aeration level and compare the results.
Start the InvestigationAbout VariableVista
Scientific models simplify reality so learners can focus on important relationships. VariableVista models are educational tools, not real-world prediction systems. Each model includes limitations so students can consider what the model represents and what it leaves out.
Start Exploring
Manage a digital fish hatchery, design a heat-resilient city, build Oregon’s 50-year energy plan, investigate groundwater flow, test wildfire spread, or explore how a hydraulic water clock measures time.