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One body, two circulationsRed: oxygenated · Blue: deoxygenated
oxygenated blooddeoxygenated bloodfrom the gut to the liver
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Your work
Glossary
Every word the labs use, with the definition it is examined on. The short list at the foot of each station is only the words that are new there.
Circulation Lab
Cambridge IGCSE Biology 0610 · Topic 9, Transport in animals: 9.1 circulatory systems, 9.2 the heart, 9.3 blood vessels, 9.4 blood
In one minute
Click any part of the body, or any step on the bar along the bottom. The body on the left lights the part each station is about, and the blood in it keeps flowing. Zoom with the − and + buttons, the mouse wheel or two fingers, drag to move around, and press Whole body to see all of it again. Labels names the parts; Beyond syllabus adds vessels the 0610 syllabus does not name.
Each station has two tabs: Learn — what you must know, with something to press, drag or watch in every section — and Practise, the questions.
Check as often as you like. You are told which parts are wrong, never the answer — you have to work it out. Keep going until it is all right.
An underlined word can be clicked: 🔍 opens a picture there and then, ↗ jumps to the station that explains it and brings you back, and a faint dotted line opens the definition.
Your work is kept in this browser and, once you sign in with your school account, sent to Dr Mompel’s records on its own as you go — there is nothing to hand in. Signed in, it follows you to another computer.
The answers are never shown. Sign in with your school Google account so Dr Mompel knows whose work it is. Anyone else is welcome to use the lab — their work simply stays in their own browser.
What the colours mean
On the body: red is oxygenated blood and blue is deoxygenated blood. That is the convention every diagram uses. Real blood is never blue: deoxygenated blood is dark red.
In the text:crimson words are about the heart; amber words are about the blood vessels and the routes the blood takes; violet words are about the blood itself; teal words are about exercise, measuring the heart and coronary heart disease.
A box with a red border is the mistake students most often make there. A small S badge means Supplement (Extended papers 2 and 4 only). “Beyond the syllabus” is not named in 0610: it helps the rest make sense, and an exam question can still use it. What you need to know holds only what the syllabus for exams in 2026–2029 asks: Cambridge’s syllabus for 2029 is word for word the same as the one for 2026–2028, so the list serves every student sitting the exams from 2026 to 2029. Press the IGCSE 0610 badge and choose your year: it shows the year of your exams and your syllabus. Everything else is in the card right below the list, “Not in the syllabus for 2026–2029”: first what an older 0610 syllabus had, with a badge such as “old syllabus · until 2015” — past papers may ask it, so tap the badge to read the old statement and whether recent papers still give marks for it — then what is beyond the syllabus, there to help the rest make sense. Do not skip it: an exam question can still use these ideas, and knowing them can be what earns you full marks.
What is simplified here
The body is a real anatomical drawing, so every vessel and organ is where it is in the body. It is still a simplified drawing: only the larger vessels are shown, and the capillaries that join them in every organ are too small to draw.
The small intestine is drawn faintly, under the vessels. Seen from the front, a real one would hide the aorta and the vena cava behind it.
The moving dots show the direction the blood flows, away from the heart in the arteries and towards it in the veins. Real blood cells are far too small to see at this scale, and far more numerous.
The magnified heart is drawn as every exam diagram draws it: cut from the front, so its right side is on your left. The aorta and the pulmonary artery leave the top side by side; in the body the pulmonary artery twists round the front of the aorta. Each atrioventricular valve is drawn as two flaps; the one on the right side of the heart really has three.
In the animations, cells and molecules are drawn much larger and far fewer than in real life, and every process is slowed down so each step can be read.
The fish and mammal circuits are circuit diagrams, not drawings of real hearts: there the aorta leaves the side of the left ventricle, and one vena cava is drawn.
In the coronary artery, the blood flow falls as the fatty deposit grows. At rest a real artery keeps its flow until it is badly narrowed; the shortage shows first during exercise.
Where the content and the pictures come from
The definitions are the wording of the syllabus for 2026–2029. Where the slides use an older wording it is given in brackets.
The stations follow Dr Mompel's own Year 10 lessons on Topic 9, and most of the pictures are the ones shown in those lessons.
The body on the left is Mariana Ruiz Villarreal's Circulatory System (LadyofHats, Wikimedia Commons, public domain), drawn from Gray's Anatomy and the Sobotta atlas — the same artist as the Digestion Lab's body. Its small intestine is hers too, from her Digestive system (with Jmarchn, public domain). The flowing blood follows the centre line of every vessel she drew; the magnified heart is drawn for this lab.
The 3D heart is a real human heart: the HuBMAP Human Reference Atlas (Browne and Schlehlein 2024), made from the Visible Human Male of the US National Library of Medicine, CC BY 4.0. Its moving valve cusps, tendons and blood paths are added for this lab.
Every other picture is credited under it and listed in full below and in assets/photos/CREDITS.md.