The authors examined the possibility of using the EcoColumn, that had been developed by the Bottle Biology Project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for teaching ecosystems in Japanese junior high schools. The EcoColumn has primarily been designed for creating a model of the ecosystem in a container made of some PET bottles and for maintaining that system so as to understand the concept of ecosystems. The author correlated the contents of junior high school science, in which the EcoColumn can be used with the aims of teaching junior high school science in the present Course of Study.

As a result, it was concluded that the EcoColumn is a good teaching material by which the relationships among organiams and those between organisms and their environmental factors can be taught to junior high school students.