Know your body
Spin the body and tap an organ to see what it does. Pick a system to show only its organs.
This page is a human body in 3D that you can spin with a finger. Tap an organ and you get what it is, what its job is and one fact worth repeating, written so a primary-school child can read it without an adult translating. There's no medical vocabulary and no diseases: the aim is for a 6-year-old to walk away knowing where the heart is and what it does, and an 11-year-old to be able to follow the whole journey of food or air.
The four systems
You can look at the whole body or switch on one system at a time, which is the easiest way to see that organs don't work alone but as a team:
Digestive system
The journey food takes, from the first bite to the end. Food goes in through the mouth, slides down the food pipe, is broken down in the stomach and moves into the small intestine, where the body takes the good stuff. The liver helps along the way and the large intestine keeps the water.
Respiratory system
How air gets in and reaches your blood. Air comes in through the nose, travels down the windpipe and fills the lungs. There the oxygen crosses into the blood. The diaphragm moves up and down to make all of this happen about twenty times a minute.
Circulatory system
The heart and the tubes that deliver blood. The heart squeezes and sends blood along the arteries all the way to your littlest toe. There it drops off oxygen and food, picks up the rubbish, and comes back along the veins to start again.
Nervous system
The wiring that connects your brain to the rest of you. The brain decides, the spinal cord carries the message down inside the backbone and the nerves spread it out to your hands and feet. The answer comes back the same way in less than a second.
How to use it
Drag with a finger or the mouse to spin the body, and pinch or scroll to zoom. Tap any lit-up organ to open its card. The buttons at the top switch one system on and the rest off. Once the names are familiar, the "Where is it?" game asks for eight organs in a row and you have to tap them on the body: it runs in the browser with nothing to install, and no account is needed to play.
For the grown-up alongside
The part that works best isn't the list of organs, it's the journey: ask them to tell you where a piece of apple goes from the moment it enters the mouth, or where the air travels before it reaches the blood. Saying it out loud with the model in front of them sticks far better than memorising names, and it makes clear what each piece is actually for. Under 8, two systems in a sitting is plenty.
Frequently asked questions
- What ages is it for?
- It's built for children aged 6 to 12. Younger ones come away knowing where each organ sits and what it's for; from about 9 they can follow a whole system end to end and explain it in their own words.
- Do we need an account, and is it free?
- No account, no cost. The page runs in the browser with nothing to install. If a child is signed in to their PetMat profile, the "Where is it?" game saves the score and awards XP, and parents see it on their dashboard.
- Which body systems does it cover?
- Four: digestive, respiratory, circulatory and nervous, with fifteen organs between them. You can see them all at once or switch on one at a time.
- Does it work on a phone or tablet?
- Yes. Drag a finger to spin the body and pinch to zoom. If the device can't render 3D, the page falls back to the same organs and the same explanations without the model.
- Does it match what they do at school?
- Yes. The four systems and their main organs are what primary science covers, roughly ages 7 to 11. Here they're in 3D with only the vocabulary that's needed — no diseases, no medical detail.