Jugami Biology

Jugami School · Field notebook

High School Biology

Biology is the study of living things, from a single bacterium to a whole forest. Each lesson here is a page from a naturalist's notebook, with drawings you can explore and a quiz at the end.

We start small, with the cell, build up to the whole human body, zoom back down to the microbes that make us sick and the defenses that fight them, then see how cells divide, then the tools scientists use to copy, read and edit DNA, then how plants move water and sugar, respond to light and make seeds, then how biologists name, group and count the variety of life, and look at the molecules of life and the enzymes that drive its chemistry, and then see how animals behave, learn, signal and help their relatives. Finish with how animals reproduce and how one fertilized egg grows into a body.

Notebook sketches of a cell, a leaf and a twisted DNA ladder fig. 1: three scales of life

Biology asks how living things work: how a single cell keeps itself alive, how traits pass from parents to children, how species change over time and where living things get their energy. This free course covers the core of a high school biology class, and it suits students taking biology for the first time, anyone reviewing before a test, and parents learning alongside their kids.

Each lesson opens with an interactive diagram: tap a part and a note explains what it does and where it is found. Some lessons add a tool to try things yourself, like a Punnett square builder, a codon decoder, a natural selection simulator or an equation balancer. A short history section shows how scientists worked each idea out, a quiz checks what stuck, and the sources at the end let you check our facts and read further. Start with The Cell, since everything else in biology is built from cells, then work through the lessons in order. Lesson 15, Conservation Biology, brings cells, genes, evolution and ecology together in the work of keeping species alive, Lesson 16 steps back to the 4.54-billion-year history of life on Earth, Lesson 17 looks inside the body at the feedback loops and hormones that keep it steady, Lesson 18 follows a nerve impulse from neuron to synapse to brain, Lesson 19 meets the yeasts, molds and protists that are neither plants nor animals, Lesson 20 tours the animal kingdom from sponges to mammals, Lesson 21 measures evolution in allele frequencies with Hardy-Weinberg and a genetic drift model, Lesson 22 follows a gene from DNA to protein and shows how cells switch genes on and off, and Lesson 23 shows how substances cross the cell membrane.

Lessons

Biology leans on chemistry, so The Periodic Table, Explained is a good companion.