If you grew up playing Sim City, you probably remember the joy of watching a tiny grid of roads and houses grow into a buzzing metropolis—and the chaos of mismanaging power lines or accidentally triggering a natural disaster. Like Age of Empires, Sim City wasn’t just a game; it quietly taught you systems thinking, trade-offs, and a surprising amount of real-world history and planning.
Looking back, those games were early “simulators of thinking.” They gave us safe sandboxes where decisions had visible consequences and where experimentation was rewarded. That same spirit now lives inside modern browser-based simulations that can run anywhere and be remixed by teachers and students.
This blog is about how those childhood city-builders and strategy games helped inspire a new collection of science simulations on Vibeteaching.io—including the launch of a new Biomedical Techniques Virtual Lab app.
From isometric pixels to virtual labs:
The same curiosity that kept us tweaking tax rates in Sim City can now be harnessed to explore ionic bonding, biomedical diagnostics, and more—directly in the browser, with teacher-editable data and AI-assisted development.
From Sim City to Science Labs
In Sim City, a tiny tweak—moving a road, placing an industrial zone too close to houses, forgetting water pipes—could ripple through your whole city. Cause and effect were visible. The game turned abstract ideas like zoning, pollution, and infrastructure into something you could feel.
Modern science simulations work the same way:
change a variable, run a test, see what happens.
Instead of citizens complaining about traffic, you get ions forming bonds, patients with abnormal lab values, or ecosystems responding to a new predator.
The goal of Vibeteaching.io is to make these kinds of interactive, explorable explanations easy to access and easy to adapt—so that you don’t just tell students about a concept, you let them play with it.
Launching the Biomedical Techniques Virtual Lab
One of the newest additions is the F173 Biomedical Techniques Virtual Lab—a browser-based simulation where students step into the role of a trainee biomedical scientist. Instead of memorising lab tests in isolation, they work through authentic patient cases, pick suitable investigations, and interpret results against reference ranges.
The app is live here: Biomedical Techniques Virtual Lab. The code is open source on GitHub at taggatron/biomedicaldiagnosis.
Educationally, it’s designed to practise:
- Research & hypothesis: turning a short case description into testable ideas.
- Planning & risk: choosing suitable biomedical tests rather than “ordering everything.”
- Processing & uncertainty: working with imperfect data, variability, and reference ranges.
- Evaluation & improvements: reflecting on why a test was (or wasn’t) appropriate.
Just like Sim City encouraged you to think like a city planner, this lab encourages learners to think like biomedical scientists—without needing a physical lab bench.
Ionic Bonding Lab: Clicking Electrons into Place
Another new simulation is the Ionic Bonding Lab, available at taggatron.github.io/ionicbonding with source at taggatron/ionicbonding.
Here, students explore how ionic bonds form by transferring valence electrons between metals and non‑metals, then classifying the resulting ions. Instead of staring at static diagrams, they click electrons, watch shells update, and see charges change in real time.
The app is structured into clean, focused sections—electron transfer, ion classification, and explanations—mirroring the way a good lesson builds from simple representations to more abstract ideas. It’s a digital “lab bench” for a topic that is usually trapped on paper.
Why These Sims Live on Vibeteaching.io
Vibeteaching.io is meant to be a home for vibecode teachers—people who are willing to combine pedagogy, creativity, and a bit of code (often with help from an LLM) to build better learning tools.
Both the Biomedical Techniques Virtual Lab and the Ionic Bonding Lab were built with the same principles:
- Teacher-editable: Data and scenarios can be adjusted without rewriting the whole app.
- Works offline / no plugins: Runs in a modern browser, including on school devices.
- Transparent process: The GitHub repos show exactly how they were made.
- Student-centred: The focus is always on exploration, feedback, and understanding.
In other words, these aren’t black boxes. They’re Sim City for science: editable sandboxes where learners (and teachers) can see how changing one part of the system ripples through everything else.
How to Start Building Your Own Sims
- Pick a concept that is usually explained with static diagrams or long text.
- Ask your favourite LLM to sketch an interactive version—sliders, buttons, steps, or simple game loops.
- Use existing examples (like the Biomedical Lab and Ionic Bonding apps) as structural templates.
- Iterate: test with a small group of students, gather feedback, and refine.
- Share it back with the community so others can remix and improve it.
If Sim City and Age of Empires quietly turned us into systems thinkers, today’s browser-based science simulations can do the same for a new generation—this time with open code, teacher control, and AI tools that help anyone become a creator.
Published by Dan — thanks for reading.