Why we built ModelIt

The Next Generation Science Standards ask students to do something new: build and use models, think in systems, and reason about how the parts of a living thing interact. But the tools that could teach that were made for researchers: too complex, too costly, or locked inside university labs. Teachers were being asked to teach modeling without a real modeling tool. That gap is why ModelIt exists.

ModelIt comes out of the Digital Twin Innovation Hub at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, an interdisciplinary research program directed by Dr. Tomas Helikar. The Hub builds multi-scale computational models of the human immune system to understand disease, identify drug targets, and develop immune digital twins, combining mechanistic modeling, AI, and in-house experimental immunology. Over years of teaching with this kind of modeling, the team learned what makes it work for students and tested it in peer-reviewed studies. ModelIt grew out of that work: inspired by Cell Collective, the Hub's research platform, but rebuilt from the ground up for K-12.

We didn't shrink the science into a toy.

We believe students learn science best by doing it: building a model, running it, finding where it breaks, and fixing it, the same loop a working scientist uses. So we didn't shrink the science into a toy. We built a guided, visual platform where a kindergartner and a 12th grader can both do real scientific modeling at their own level, with complete materials and a teacher's guide behind every lesson. ModelIt is built by Discovery Collective, an NIH-supported education company in Lincoln, Nebraska.