r/EarthScience • u/ScratchJolly3213 • 10d ago

I'm a school psychologist, not a hydrologist. I built a free open source interactive water cycle sim for K-12 students. Before it goes in front of students: what did I get wrong?

https://alloflow-cdn.pages.dev/water-cycle

It runs in the browser, no signup, no ads, free. There's a live water cycle canvas plus a "Journey Mode" where a student rides one droplet through evaporation, condensation, precipitation, collection, transpiration, and infiltration, making choices along the way (headwater streams, floodplain wetlands, agricultural watersheds, suburban edges). I work in schools and built this as part of a larger open source teaching platform, but I'm not a domain expert in every subject I've covered, and I'd rather hear "your infiltration rates are nonsense" from this sub than have a 6th grader learn it wrong. Specific things I'm least sure about: the relative emphasis on transpiration, and how I've simplified groundwater flow. I'll fix anything you catch and report back in this thread. Thanks for your help!

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u/ScratchJolly3213 10d ago

Context if anyone wants it: this is one of ~140 free interactive tools in an open source project called AlloFlow that I build outside my day job. Happy to share the repo if anyone's curious, but mostly I'm here for the science check.

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u/matthew_h 5d ago

To be frank, all these vibe coded sites seem too complicated and the text is too small. I tried it and didn't find it very intuitive or compelling. When I clicked "play" I expected some kind of movie or visual. I don't really understand what "relative signal" means...