For teachers · grades 1–7
Two iOS games about fish that have to get home. Students play a life cycle instead of reading a diagram of one, then talk about what made survival hard. Each game is one purchase — no ads, no in-app purchases, no accounts, no tracking, and no internet needed once installed.
Salmon Run · grades 2–7
Students take one Pacific salmon through the part of the story a classroom tank cannot show: the run downstream, the years at sea, and the climb back up to spawn. Bears wait at the falls, eagles drop from above, nets line the banks, and a dam sits across the water. Reaching the spawning ground starts the run again in the next generation.
Salmon Run on the App Store →Return of the C'waam · grades 1–3
Students tend Upper Klamath Lake and guide c'waam — an endemic sucker fish — from the shoreline spawning springs, through the larval drift, into the shoreline nursery. The cycle can break before young fish return as adults, and the game lets that happen without blaming the player.
Return of the C'waam on the App Store →Classroom incubation usually ends where the story gets hardest to see. Students raise eggs to fry, walk down to the stream, and let them go. What happens next — the run downstream, the years at sea, the return to spawn — is the part no tank can show. Salmon Run picks up at that release point and carries one fish through the rest of the journey, so students can talk about the odds a fry actually faces after the bucket is empty. It supplements a salmon unit or an in-class incubation program. It does not replace the lesson or the incubation experience.
Return of the C'waam is the same idea in a lake instead of a river, pitched younger, and built against the Oregon Department of Education's SB13 Tribal Curriculum for grades 1–3. Its in-game facts and educator prompts are tied to specific source claims and to that curriculum's grade-band emphases.
| Standard | Game | Fit | What in the game supports it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3-LS1-1 | Both | Core | Life cycles with birth, growth, reproduction, death. Both games are built on a full cycle, and both let students watch where it continues and where it breaks. |
| 3-LS4-3 | Both | Core | Some organisms survive well in a habitat, some less well, some not at all. Every run ends on a card naming what ended it — predation, warm or low water, a barrier, the open sea. |
| 3-LS4-4 | Both | Core | A solution to a problem caused when the environment changes. Barriers, habitat loss, and water quality are the pressures; the discussion prompts ask what a community could protect or restore. |
| 2-LS4-1 | C'waam | Supporting | Diversity of life across habitats. Shoreline springs, open lake, and the vegetated nursery each hold different life and different risk. |
| 4-LS1-1 | Salmon Run | Supporting | Structures and behaviors that support survival. The game shows behavior — cover-seeking, timing, reading the current — more than anatomy, so pair it with a body-parts lesson. |
| 5-ESS3-1 | Both | Supporting | How communities use science ideas to protect Earth's resources. Best reached through the stewardship prompts rather than through play alone. |
| MS-LS2-1 | Salmon Run | Core | Effects of resource availability on populations. Repeated runs give students data: out of many fry, how many came back, and which pressures recurred. |
| MS-LS2-4 | Salmon Run | Core | Changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations. Temperature, flow, obstruction, and predation all move the outcome. |
| MS-LS2-5 | Salmon Run | Supporting | Competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services. Discussion-level: what would you restore first, and why that instead of something else. |
Crosscutting concepts: Cause and Effect · Patterns · Systems and System Models · Stability and Change. Practices: Developing and Using Models · Analyzing and Interpreting Data · Constructing Explanations · Engaging in Argument from Evidence.
Return of the C'waam's grade-1 band maps more cleanly to tribal-curriculum outcomes — adaptations, survival behaviors, and the cultural and ecological importance of a fish — than to any single NGSS performance expectation. Washington teachers working in Since Time Immemorial will recognize the shape; the game was built against Oregon's SB13 equivalent.
If you teach at a Title 1 school and the price is the thing standing between your students and these games, email contact@hldelaney.com and I will send you free App Store codes for your classroom. No form, no proof of anything, no catch. Just tell me which game and roughly how many you need.
Both games are independent projects built from publicly available scientific and educational sources. Return of the C'waam draws on the Oregon Department of Education's SB13 Klamath Tribes curriculum for grades 1–3, and every fact it shows a student is tied to a named source. You can read the whole thing — 27 claims, each with the source behind it — in the Return of the C'waam source register. Salmon Run is a supplement to programs like DFO's Stream to Sea and to in-class incubation; it is not a Tribal teaching artifact.
Source links and acknowledgments do not imply endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation by any agency, program, or institution.
Made by H.L. Delaney — enrolled member of the Klamath Confederated Tribes, Modoc ancestry — and published through Basalt Sea Press.