By Ronica Stromberg
A University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor has been teaching local high school and college students about ecosystems and resilience using the block-stacking game Jenga®.
Daniel Uden said university students sparked his use of the game in classrooms. A past Nebraska doctoral student, Jessica Burnett, pitched the idea of using Jenga® to teach ecological resilience concepts in college classes. Graduate students who had formed the Council for Resilience Education as part of the National Science Foundation Researc Traineeship at Nebraska then adapted Jenga® game sets by numbering blocks from 1 to 9 and pretending the tower built with them was an ecosystem. Numbered blocks related to values of agricultural yields.
The council students wrote directions for how to play each round of the game with one of five different policy scenarios. Their idea was to have players track their scores under each policy scenario as they tried to remove high-yield blocks and still keep the ecosystem, or tower, resilient. In class, student players would discuss the management policies and the tradeoffs made between high yield and resilience.
“They have to think about, ‘Do I want the really valuable block, the high-yield block?’ but they have to also be thinking about the resilience of the overall system,” Uden said. “So, how will removing that block effect the ability of the tower to not collapse?”
Uden and Jenny Keshwani, an engineering professor, played this version of the game with six students and a teaching assistant in the class Systems Thinking Through Food, Energy, Water, and Societal Systems on March 13, 2025.
As students removed blocks from the tower, they saw it fell faster or yielded less under different policies. Sean Poppens, a senior in biological systems engineering, said the activity gave a good visual representation of the relationship between policy and resilience.
“It immediately demonstrates how the policy and the restraints can affect the resilience in the system,” he said.
Jared Toof, a biomedical engineering senior, said the game helped him visualize the rate at which a system is approaching a tipping point.
“You can see the tipping point, but depending on what you use, you can't really see the rate of it,” he said. “This helps you visualize that rate.”
Sarah Al Wahaibi noted that when people see the tipping point, they still can do some damage control by counterbalancing or mitigating.
Dylan Sash, a senior in mechanized systems management, said he thought the activity was good visualization regardless of the level.
Uden has created another level of this resilience Jenga® game, simplifying it for high school students and streamlining it. He said his goal with both levels is to get students thinking about resilience and ecosystem services, such as yield, at the same time.
He led about 80 sophomores from Lincoln Northeast High School in the simplified version on East Campus in December 2024. The Early College and Career STEM program between the school and university sponsored the session.
Uden then led about 100 freshmen from Omaha’s Burke High School in three similar Jenga® sessions on East Campus in January 2025. These high schoolers and about 200 others visited the campus in a collaboration between Omaha Public Schools and the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources. The university hosted the visits to inform students about degree studies it offers toward more than 400 careers in agriculture and natural resources.
Uden teaches in the environmental science major within the School of Natural Resources and in the grassland systems major through the Center for Grassland Studies. He uses the Jenga® game in exploring resilience concepts in both fields.
“In a lot of ways, I see myself as an ambassador for those majors during those visits,” he said. “So, it's a good way for us as faculty, who work in those majors, to begin engaging with high school students and, hopefully, contribute to a positive experience on campus but, also, give them some awareness of our programs.”
He said he has also carried out the resilience Jenga® activity to build on the work of the CRE students and help the work of the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship at Nebraska live on past grant funding. He said he wants to contribute to CASNR efforts to engage high school students.
Bailey Feit, the university’s Early College and Career STEM program coordinator, said she enjoyed working with Uden on the resilience project and felt it engaged students.
“Dan’s ecosystem resilience Jenga® game was highly engaging and fit perfectly into the biology curriculum at Lincoln Public Schools,” she said. “Through CASNR’s partnership with LPS, we have an opportunity to showcase the integral work folks do on East Campus to solve grand challenges as well as bring awareness to how vital agriculture and natural resources are to the students’ daily lives, in addition to the number of career and college pathways available to them.”
Uden said he would be interested in working through her and Tammera Mittelstet's office in CASNR to further develop the activity with high school teachers for use in their classrooms.
“I'd be excited to look for more opportunities to align with the high school curriculum,” he said. “What are they talking about right now and how can we make a connection?”
The high school students who had already discussed resilience in a biology class proved more ready for the Jenga® activity, but younger students could understand it when he explained the concepts and weaved them in more, Uden said.
He has a dozen Jenga® sets already numbered and said he was willing to lend them to teachers. They can contact him at the Center for Resilience in Agricultural Working Landscapes by the email duden2@unl.edu.