Beam Drip
The water cycle, as a game you play with light.
Rain, snow and hail fall. You steer a beam of sunlight underneath them and send them back up to the clouds before the pond below fills and the round ends.
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Drag or tap to steer the light across the sky.
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When the light touches the drops, they melt and float back to the clouds.
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Every drop you miss collects below. Once it reaches the line the round is over.
The Drops
💧 Rain lifts instantly
Liquid water needs the least energy to evaporate. Touch it with the beam and it vanishes instantly!
❄️ Snow and hail need time
Ice has to absorb its latent heat before it can melt and evaporate, so it takes longer to vanish. Hold them in the beam, or ping pong back and forth. (Snow and hail look different in other worlds!)
Red Drops & Golden Drops
Red drops = storms! Avoid them. Letting them fall into the pond won't add to the pond fill. Golden raindrops give you a rainbow clearing, and a couple seconds of calm. Bank them to use in game by completing trivia!
Earth and other three-phase cycles!
We know a lot about the water cycle here on Earth, but Beam Drip also hopes to teach you a little bit about the three-phase cycles of other worlds!
🌍 Earth
Our water world we know and love! In game facts teach the basics of the water cycle, and also dive deeper into fascinating connections to pique new interests!
🪐 Titan
On Saturn's largest moon it is −179 °C! So incredibly cold that methane (The stuff that is natural gas on Earth) shows up in liquid and solid form! Here methane rains and snows, pools into lakes, and evaporates; a complete cycle with a liquid that is not water.
🌋 K2-141b
A lava exoplanet roughly 200 light-years away. Tidally locked, so its dayside is a permanent ocean of molten rock: rock vapour rises, drifts to the nightside, and falls as lava and stone!
Built deliberately
A go/no-go task
Red storm drops must be avoided while every other drop must be chased. That is a go/no-go paradigm — a standard way of exercising inhibitory control. In the harder worlds the palettes shift until ordinary drops start to resemble the ones to avoid, which adds Stroop-like visual conflict, training visual discrimination.
☮ Peace mode
A calm round with no storm drops at all and no way to lose. Built for players who find timers and failure states stressful, and for a classroom that wants the science without the arcade pressure. Also great for slowing down before bed instead of doom scrolling.
Accessibility as a feature
Honours prefers-reduced-motion, meets WCAG AA contrast on body text, storm drops differ in shape and motion as well as hue, so red–green colour blindness does not cost you the round.
For teachers, homeschoolers, and curious minds!
Sixty-six questions across twenty-two topics, each checked against a cited source. Free to use, free to print, no sign-up.