The first MUVE represents a pond ecosystem, based on Black's Nook, a freshwater pond in Cambridge, MA. Students explore the pond and the surrounding area, even walking under the water, and see different organisms in their natural habitats. Students use a micro-submarine to zoom in and see the microscopic organisms in the pond. They can learn about the organisms they find in a field guide and can construct a food web. Students collect water measurements (e.g., temperature, dissolved oxygen, phosphates, nitrates, pH, temperature), observe the weather, and make observations by exploring the terrain and developments in the neighborhood of the pond.

Students visit the pond over a number of virtual “days” – each day the pond and surrounding area look different, people provide new information, and baseline data has altered. Students view the data over time using tables and multi-dimensional graphs. Eventually, students make the surprising discovery that, on a day in late summer, many fish in the pond have died. Students are challenged to figure out what happened to the fish. They work in teams to collect and analyze data, gather information to solve the mystery, and come to understand the complex causality of the pond ecosystem.

Students work as teams to visit two forested islands over a span of fifty years to see how the populations and forest structure change on each island over time. Both islands include populations of deer; one also has a population of wolves, leading to very different effects. One island has a lot of vegetation, is rich in insect diversity, and has many birds. The second island has little vegetation and seems to lack many of the organisms that depend on the understory vegetation as habitat. By monitoring changes over time, students learn that these two islands look so different due in large part to the relationship between deer and their primary predator, the grey wolf.