Every living thing is built from cells. Build one here: pick the
membrane shape first, then place the organelles that do the work.
- All living things are made of one or more cells.
- The cell is the basic unit of structure in every organism.
- Every cell comes from a cell that already existed.
A cell works like a factory: each part has one job.
- Nucleus — stores DNA, directs the cell
- Ribosomes — build proteins
- Mitochondria — release energy as ATP
- Rough ER — makes proteins for export
- Smooth ER — makes lipids, breaks down toxins
- Golgi body — packs and ships proteins
- Lysosome — digests waste and debris
- Vacuole — stores water, food and waste
- Chloroplast — captures light to make sugar
- Cell wall — rigid support on the outside
Tap any organelle in the palette to read
its job again.
Prokaryotic — bacteria
- No nucleus: the DNA floats free.
- No membrane-bound organelles.
- Small, 1–10 µm, usually walled.
Eukaryotic — you, plants, fungi
- DNA packed inside a nucleus.
- Many membrane-bound organelles.
- Larger, 10–100 µm.
- Pick a membrane shape from the card on the stage.
- Tap an organelle in the Add palette.
- Tap anywhere in the cell to place it — keep tapping for more.
- Inspect explains a structure; Select moves or deletes it.
- Eight missions, plus a quiz on naming cells.
A teaching model of cell architecture, not a working cell.
- The membrane really is a bilayer — water-loving heads out, tails meeting
in the middle.
- Which organelles a cell gets depends on the kind of cell it is.
- Cell walls go on plants, fungi and bacteria, never on animal cells.
- Grow the cell and its surface-area-to-volume ratio always falls.
- Organelles are not drawn to the same scale — each is big enough to see
and to tap.
A real ribosome would be a fraction of one pixel here, and
every mission needs ribosomes.
- Counts stand in for amounts: five mitochondria, not several thousand.
The idea being tested is the comparison, not the census.
- The membrane band is drawn far too thick; a real one is about 7 nm.
You cannot see a whole cell and one phospholipid at the same
magnification.
- The size slider runs 20–100 µm, wider than most animal cells.
You need a range wide enough that the ratio visibly collapses
as you drag.
- Nothing here runs: no ATP is made, no protein travels, no water crosses.
- The membrane is phospholipids only — no cholesterol, no glycoproteins.
- Bacteria get a plasmid but not their main circular chromosome.
- No cytoskeleton, no nucleolus, no peroxisomes, no flagella.