For teachers
Wild Willows in the classroom
Two free, ready-to-run kits built on the same game. One is science, one is computer science, and they work equally well on their own. No accounts, no cost, nothing to install.
Ecosystems & Habitat
Students restore a damaged meadow, log which animals return and when, and work out that habitat means food, water, shelter and space together. Nothing is hunted or lost, and there is no way to fail.
- Educator guide and six printable worksheets
- Runs on the free browser demo, or offline once installed
- English and Español
- Discussion prompts and a “game vs. nature” critique sheet
- Mapped to NGSS, code by code, with what each one is actually covered by
Intro to APIs & Web Development
Students learn how HTML, CSS, JavaScript and APIs work together by pulling real Wild Willows data into a webpage they build themselves. Every code sample in the lesson is editable and runs when they press Run.
- Ten-chapter interactive lesson and a browser code editor
- No prior coding experience, for students or for you
- Real public API, not a mock dataset
- Lesson flows for one, two or three periods, and an answer key
- Mapped to CSTA, 2026 codes and their 2017 equivalents
Free copies for your classroom
A limited number of promo codes are set aside for teachers: full copies of the game, no cost and no expiry. Email [email protected] from your school address with your school, your grade level, and roughly how many machines you need, along with a sentence or two about how you would like to use the game with your class.
Neither kit requires this. The science kit runs on the free browser demo and the coding kit runs on this site, so you can teach both today and ask later.
Questions teachers ask first
Do I have to buy anything?
No. Both kits are free and everything they need runs in a browser. The science kit uses the free demo, and the coding kit uses two pages on this site. The guides and worksheets are free as well.
Do students need accounts?
No accounts, no email, and no sign-in, in either kit. Nothing a student writes in the code editor is sent anywhere: it stays in that browser until they download it themselves.
Can I photocopy the worksheets?
Yes. Print them, photocopy them, translate them, cut them up and adapt them for your own classes as much as you like. The only thing asked is that you do not resell them.
What data is collected about students?
It differs by kit, so here is both.
The coding kit is counts only, never linked to a person: which chapters were reached, which errors the editor explained, roughly how long a session ran. Student code never leaves the browser.
The science kit uses the game, and the game reports more than that. While a machine is online it sends a snapshot of the save every few minutes: gameplay counters, the platform and language, the settings in use, a random save ID, and the caretaker name the student typed. That last field is free text, so have the class use the dice button beside it rather than their own names. No world file, no journal and no worksheet answer is ever transmitted.
Neither kit uses accounts, cookies for tracking, third-party analytics or advertising identifiers. A snapshot can be deleted on request. If your district needs this in writing, the privacy policy lists every field and has a section addressed to schools.
Which kit should I use?
Whichever matches your subject. They share a world and neither depends on the other, so there is no order to follow and no reason to run both.
If you teach both, the science kit makes a good week-one introduction to the world the coding kit then queries. That is a nice connection rather than a requirement.
Will this work on our network?
Both kits need wildwillows.app and play.wildwillows.app reachable. Check that a week before you teach rather than the morning of: a filtered domain is the single most common way one of these lessons goes wrong, and it takes an IT ticket to fix.
Once installed, the game plays entirely offline — a machine that never reaches the network runs the whole science lesson, and sends nothing. It does report gameplay counters when it is online; the privacy policy lists what. The coding kit needs the connection throughout, because fetching real data over a real network is the thing it teaches.
Using this with a class?
Tell me how it went. What confused students, what ran long, what you had to change: all of it is useful, and it is what these pages get rewritten from.