This town-building game teaches complex systems. Made in partnership with the Scalable Systems Lab at UW-Madison. Played by thousands of kids a month.
In this strategic building game, you’ve decided to build a new town called Lakeland. In order to grow your town and keep your people alive, you need food and resources.
Luckily, you’ve got some friendly advisors to help you get started. Your Farm Advisor shows you how to grow corn. Now your people have food! Then you start a dairy farm. People love dairy. Milk, cheese, ice cream… what could go wrong?
As it turns out, a lot. Cows don’t just produce milk. They also produce lots and lots of poop, which means the lakes your people love are about to turn into a toxic cesspool of blue-green algae. Your mission: grow your town without destroying their lakes.
This game puts kids in charge of building their own town. Players add houses and farms, export produce, and manage resources like food, money, and manure. Students will get an introduction to the complex relationship between farming, soil nutrition, and lake pollution.
Want to learn more about Lakeland and Victor Zavala's research? Read the Story
Teachers can use Lakeland to explore the dynamics of the nutrient system and help students recognize the impact humans have on the world.
This game helps students visualize the complex relationship between dairy farming, soil nutrition, and lake pollution. Time is compressed so that students can see the long-term effects within a 20-30 minute game. Students will get a sense of the difficulty of balancing farming and business demands with sustainability and happiness.
Let kids figure out how the game works with little introduction. Remember, struggling to figure it out is part of the fun process. It’s okay for kids to experiment, fail, and start again.
The game addresses the Next Generation Science Standards essential practice of Modeling alongside the cross-cutting concepts of Patterns, Cause and Effect, and Systems and System Models. The game also relates to the below Next Generation Science Standards:
MS-LS2-1
Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.
MS-LS2-2
Construct an explanation that predicts patterns of interactions among organisms across multiple ecosystems.
MS-LS2-3
Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.
MS-LS2-4
Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.
MS-LS2-5
Evaluate competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.
MS-ESS3-3
Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
HS-LS2-1
Use mathematical and/or computational representations to support explanations of factors that affect carrying capacity of ecosystems at different scales.
HS-LS2-2
Use mathematical representations to support and revise explanations based on evidence about factors affecting biodiversity and populations in ecosystems of different scales.
HS-LS2-6
Evaluate the claims, evidence, and reasoning that the complex interactions in ecosystems maintain relatively consistent numbers and types of organisms in stable conditions, but changing conditions may result in a new ecosystem.
HS-LS2-7
Design, evaluate, and refine a solution for reducing the impacts of human activities on the environment and biodiversity.
HS-LS4-6
Create or revise a simulation to test a solution to mitigate adverse impacts of human activity on biodiversity.
Victor M. Zavala
David Gagnon
Philip Dougherty
Sarah Gagnon
Philip Dougherty
Jim Mathews
Eric Lang
Eric Lang
Victor M. Zavala
Rebecca Larson
Lindy Biller
Philip Dougherty
Cyril Peck
Jim Mathews
Jenn Scianna
John Mcclosky
Luke Swanson
Jenn Scianna
Erik Harpstead
Stefan Slater
Philip Dougherty
David Gagnon
Angel Cartagena
Adam Chase
Ahna Holliday
Becki Kohl
Jim Lyne
Amy Workman
Anthony Schnell
Benjamin Stern
Craig Corcoran
Heather Messer
Meghan Sawdy
Olivia Dachel
Robert Turner
Zeth Engel
Students of Reedsburg Area High School
Students of Lodi High School
Students of Fox Valley Lutheran High School
Students of Guilford High School
Students of Clark Street Community School
Students of Vincent High School
Students of Merrill High School
Students of Omro High School
Students of DeForest High School
Jayvyn G.
Henry T.
Nethra G.
Zane Y.
Sidney M.
Brennan R.
Lucy W.
Gabe W.
Ava E.
Jacob S.
Travis Tangen
Dan Murphy
Jerrod Buckner
Bryan Knowles
Students and Staff of the Scalable Systems Laboratory
Lakeland is an open-source project licensed under the MIT license. learn more
United States Department of Agriculture Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water (USDA INFEWS). Principal Investigator: Victor M. Zavala
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction,
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
Our team is based at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. We make learning games that bring contemporary research to the public, and we use the game data to understand how people learn.
Interested in making something together? email David Gagnon
for all other inquiries, please contact Reyna Groff
Read the stories behind our games and meet the researchers and teachers who have teamed up with us.
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