What caused the change?
Labs / History
The Columbian Exchange
After 1492, ships carried living things between two worlds that had been apart for millennia. Drag maize, potato, horse, wheat, sugar & smallpox across the ocean and watch the receiving side's population, calorie supply, and economy answer back — crop booms on one side, catastrophic epidemics on the other.
Labs / History / The Columbian Exchange
The Columbian Exchange
After 1492, ships carried living things between two worlds that had been apart for millennia. Drag maize, potato, horse, wheat, sugar & smallpox across the ocean and watch the receiving side's population, calorie supply, and economy answer back — crop booms on one side, catastrophic epidemics on the other.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
History is about change over time and the choices that shape it. This model helps you compare causes, consequences, and patterns without treating the past as a list of dates.
Explore
Try the model
Year 1492OW pop 400 MOW kcal 100NW pop 60 MNW kcal 100Epidemic deaths 0.0 M
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Send only the potato to the Old World. How much bigger does Europe's population grow with one new crop?
- Introduce smallpox alone to the New World. Why does the death toll climb fastest in the first decades and then slow?
- Run the full exchange. Which hemisphere gains people and which one collapses — and why isn't it symmetric?
- Add sugar to the New World. Its economy soars while calories barely move — what human cost does that number hide?
- Pull every crop back but leave the horse. Can mobility alone change a society without changing what it eats?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Build an explanation with a cause, a change, and a consequence. Then identify evidence from the model and one limitation of what the model can show.
Check
Before you leave
Who or what was affected?
What can this model not tell us?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.