On a recent Monday at Marrow Glen High School, sophomore Eli Navarro leaned over a desk and slid a pencil arrow from “energy in” to “staying steady,” then paused to add two words: “keeps running.” Across the room, his lab partner countered with another arrow — this one from “DNA” to “change over time” — and the class’s debate shifted from memorizing traits of living things to tracing what depends on what.

The discussion was part of a new district pilot called Living Systems Studio, a unit that asks students to treat life as a network of linked processes rather than a checklist of traits.

“What I’m listening for is whether they can tell me what supports what,” biology teacher Noreen Park said as students compared arrows on their papers. “If they claim something is alive, they have to explain how it keeps going — and what breaks first when a link fails.”

Park said the approach was designed to reduce the “flash-card” feel of older lessons and replace it with cause-and-effect reasoning. Students work through case files — a hibernating toad, a sealed terrarium, a computer virus, a flame, a self-repairing robot — and are expected to defend their classifications by pointing to dependencies.

Following the energy

In one case file, students examined data from a classroom terrarium: oxygen levels rising in the day, falling at night; condensation forming on the glass; a small drop in mass after several weeks.

Student teams were asked to present a narrative of what was happening, not just name processes.

“Think like ranked play,” Park told the class, prompting a wave of nods from the gaming club members clustered near the windows. “If you stop managing resources, you don’t just lose one stat. Everything starts collapsing.”

Navarro later translated his group’s argument in those terms.

“You’ve got inputs and a budget,” he said, tapping the terrarium chart. “Energy processing is like collecting gold and spending it. If you can’t bring energy in and use it, you can’t keep your ‘health bar’ steady — temperature, water balance, all that. Then you can’t keep playing.”

Park’s whiteboard notes from the period traced the chain students were required to defend in their presentations: energy processing → supports homeostasis → enables sustained function. When one group argued the terrarium plants were “fine” because they were not moving, Park pressed them on the consequences.

“Show me what would happen if the energy link is cut,” she said.

The group pointed to their own arrows: without energy processing, the internal balance they’d labeled “steady conditions” would drift, and the system’s functions — growth, repair and response — would falter.

Across the room, another team used coffee to make the same point in different language.

“Metabolism is basically brewing,” student Lila Chen said during the class share-out. “You don’t just have coffee — you have inputs, a process, and outputs. Water and grounds go in, heat drives it, coffee comes out, and there’s waste left behind. If your ‘brewer’ isn’t working, you don’t get the product you need to function.”

Park said she encourages multiple analogies because it forces students to restate relationships rather than recite terms.

Information that lasts — and changes

Later in the week, the unit pivots to a new argument: what it means for living systems to persist across generations.

In a lab centered on fruit flies, students tracked inherited traits, then compared their class data to a fictional “island population” scenario in which a storm changed available food.

The assignment asked students to map a second dependency chain in their concept maps: genetic information → inheritance → evolution.

The most spirited explanation came from the esports team, who described population change in terms of competitive updates.

“DNA is like the codebase,” said senior Malik Rahman, captain of the school’s arena squad. “Inheritance is how the build gets copied. Then the environment is the ladder. Over time, the meta shifts — like patch notes — and what used to be strong isn’t. The population changes because the ‘builds’ that fit the new patch win more.”

Park said the point is not to turn evolution into a game, but to show students that long-term change depends on information that can be copied with variation.

“When they say ‘evolution happens,’ I ask, ‘What’s the thing being passed on?’” she said. “They have to point back to information, and then show how it moves through generations.”

A sketch students can carry

The unit’s central product is a hand-drawn concept map students update as each case file adds another dependency.

Park described a “minimum sketch” she wants students to be able to recreate from memory on a blank page:

• Draw a center bubble labeled “Living system”.
• On the left, draw a bubble labeled “Energy processing (metabolism)” and an arrow into the center labeled “powers”.
• From Energy processing, draw an arrow to a bubble above the center labeled “Homeostasis (internal balance)” with the arrow label “supports”.
• From Homeostasis, draw an arrow back toward the center labeled “enables sustained function”.
• On the right, draw a bubble labeled “Genetic information (DNA/RNA)” with an arrow to a bubble labeled “Inheritance” labeled “copied to offspring”.
• From Inheritance, draw an arrow to “Evolution over time” labeled “shifts in populations”.
• Add an arrow from Evolution over time back to the center labeled “adapts across generations”.
• Finally, beneath the center, add “Response & repair” as a bubble, with arrows from Energy processing (labeled “provides materials/energy”) and from Homeostasis (labeled “keeps conditions workable”) into it, and an arrow from Response & repair back to the center labeled “maintains”.

Students are not graded on artistry, Park said, but on whether their arrows tell a coherent story.

“If their arrows could be rearranged without changing meaning, they haven’t nailed it yet,” she said.

Where the arguments get real

The most contested day in the pilot came when students were given three borderline examples: a flame, a dormant seed and a self-learning robot.

The debate exposed what district science coordinator Javier Mendoza said the unit is designed to reveal.

“A flame uses energy and can spread, so kids want to call it alive,” Mendoza said. “But when they try to connect it to keeping internal conditions stable, or to storing and copying information across generations, their map makes the gaps visible.”

The seed, by contrast, created a different kind of argument. Students pointed to the “pause” in energy processing, then traced the links they believed remained intact.

“They argued that the information is still there, the capacity is still there, and when conditions change, energy processing ramps up and homeostasis starts operating again,” Mendoza said.

For Navarro, the concept map turned a familiar topic into something he felt he could use outside class.

“It’s like troubleshooting,” he said, sliding his paper into a folder. “If something isn’t acting alive, you look for what link is missing — energy, balance, info, passing it on. It’s not just a list. It’s how the system stays online.”

District officials said the pilot will continue through the spring, with teachers collecting student work and revising the case files.

Mendoza said the goal is not to end debates about what counts as life, but to improve the quality of the arguments.

“If students leave able to explain why one process depends on another,” he said, “they’ve learned something that transfers — to ecology, to health, to anything that’s a system.”