Briefing
How many different organs does your heart work with? How about your lungs? In this game, you'll test your knowledge of the body's systems and how they work together.
Activity
Your patient's organs are all missing. It's your job to put them back into his body... one system at a time!
Click the red start button, and the challenge will begin.
You'll see the empty body on the left, and a whole bunch of mixed-up organs on the right. When you roll your mouse over an organ, it will tell you what it is. To put an organ back, click on it and drag it over to the body.
Once system at a time, your patient will tell you what he's missing. Your job is to put all of the organs that belong in that system back in the body. You don't need to know exactly where they go, but if you drag in an organ that doesn't belong, you'll have to start over!
Debriefing
Did you find out anything you didn't know before? What do you think would happen if any one of the organs in a system was missing or damaged? Can you think of other systems in the body?
If you've got your Journals, go ahead and answer the questions in them now!
More Info
Your Organs: It's All Part of the System
Your body's organs can't do their jobs on their own. Everything that one organ does directly affects at least some other organs. And every organ depends on other organs to help do its job.
When a bunch of organs work together on one big project, that's called a system. For example, the organs that help you eat and digest food, including the tongue, stomach, intestines, liver, and gall bladder, make up the digestive system.
Probably the most jam-packed system in the body is the muscular system. There are over 600 different muscles in your body, from the leg muscles that let you walk, to the muscles in your jaw that let you talk and eat. (By the way, everybody has the same number of muscles, whether you?re a 300 pound weightlifter or the skinniest kid on the basketball team. The only difference is in how big the muscles are.)
Many organs play a part in more than one system. For example, organs that help move blood around -- the heart, veins, and arteries -- make up the circulatory system. And the lungs are part of the respiratory system, which is all about breathing. But they are also connected together, because your blood needs to pick up oxygen from the lungs. In this game, we put those two systems together, and call it the respiratory/circulatory system. Another part of the respiratory system is the trachea (that?s pronounced "TRAY-key-uh"). It's the air tube that goes from your mouth to your lungs.
In fact, that's a good example of how entire systems connect with each other. You need the respiratory system to collect oxygen from the air, so the circulatory system can carry it around in your blood to all your cells?including your muscle cells. The muscular system depends on the skeletal system ? bones, like the skull, ribcage, pelvis and femur (it's pronounced "FEE-mer" and it's your thigh bone) for structure and support. And almost all the systems depend on your nervous system, which includes the brain, spinal cord, and nerves to help run it and tell the organs what to do. The eyes can also be considered part of the nervous system, since they carry images to the brain.
All of these systems work together to make up the coolest system of all: you!