Digestion Lab

Your work

The limits of this model

Visking tubing is a good model of the wall of the small intestine. It is not a fair copy of everything that wall does.

Amylase breaks starch into maltose — in the tubing and in the gut alike.
In the tubing, that maltose diffuses straight out through the wall. The tubing is nothing but a filter with holes in it, and maltose is small enough to fit.
In the gut it cannot. Maltase, built into the membrane of the microvilli, has to break the maltose into glucose first. Only then is the glucose taken in, and taken in by active transport.

That last step is where the model stops being true: the tubing lets things through, and the wall of the small intestine is living tissue that does work to take a molecule in.

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.

Cambridge IGCSE Biology 0610 · Topic 7, Human nutrition

In one minute

Click any organ on the body, or any step on the bar along the bottom.
Each station has two tabs: Learn — what you must know — 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. Signed in, your work is saved for Dr Mompel on its own — there is nothing to press at the end.
Follow the food plays the journey as five processes, mouth to anus, and opens the station for each one.
An underlined word can be clicked: 🔍 opens a picture there and then, ↗ jumps to the station that explains it and brings you back.
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; it is then sent to his records as you go. Anyone else is welcome to use the lab — their work simply stays in their own browser.

What the colours mean

The five processes each wear a numbered chip — 1 ingestion, 2 digestion, 3 absorption, 4 assimilation, 5 egestion — so you can see both which stage a sentence is about and where it comes in the order. Physical and chemical digestion are both stage 2, told apart by colour.
A key word in the same colour as a chip belongs to that stage. Food molecules are the exception: dotted underline, because you must never mix them up with the enzymes acting on them.
Words deliberately not coloured are worth noticing — excretion stays plain black, because it is not one of the five.
The colour key sits at the top of every Learn tab, so you never have to remember.
A green-bordered box 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 — the Beyond syllabus button shows or hides those organs on the body. 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.
Above the key words, “Going further” links this station to other 0610 topics (with the syllabus reference), to what IB adds, and to science beyond the syllabus.

What is simplified here

The body is a real anatomical plate, so the organs are in their true positions. The liver is on your left as you look at the screen — the patient's right. That is the convention, and how the exam will draw it.
The liver station also lights the gall bladder and the bile ducts in the liver: they are drawn as one piece, which shows the whole route — liver → ducts → gall bladder → bile duct → duodenum.
Optimum pH values are single figures (pepsin ≈ 2, amylase ≈ 7, trypsin and lipase ≈ 8). Real enzymes work across a range; the figure is the peak.
The food particle shrinks and changes colour as it travels: a visual aid, not a measurement.
The small intestine is drawn as a few tidy coils. In life it is 6–7 m of tightly packed loops.

Where the content and the pictures come from

The wording follows Dr Mompel's own 7.1–7.5 lesson slides and Topic 7 notes, and the phrasing used in Cambridge 0610 mark schemes.
Most photographs and micrographs are the same images used in class. The diet station is the exception: those come from Wikimedia Commons, each credited under the picture.
It covers Topic 7 in full, and reaches back into Topic 4 (biological molecules), Topic 5 (enzymes) and Topic 3 (movement in and out of cells).
Body plate: Digestive system without labels by Mariana Ruiz (LadyofHats) and Jmarchn — Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Tooth section: Tooth Section numbered by Jak — public domain. Villus: Intestinal villus simplified by Snow93 — public domain.
Diet photographs, from Wikimedia Commons: high-fibre foods by formulatehealth (CC BY 2.0); grain products by Scott Bauer, USDA (public domain); salmon by DanaTentis and beans by Bean appreciator (both CC0); butter by markusspiske (CC0); olive oil by ajay_suresh (CC BY 2.0).
All labels, animations, questions and page design are original to this simulation.

Dr Daniel Mompel Riera — Biology, North London Collegiate School Jeju. Questions or corrections: dmompelriera@nlcsjeju.kr. One of the Human Body labs · Biology Hub