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To help young people understand socio-environmental systems and develop the confidence that meaningful action can be taken to address socio-environmental problems, young people need interactive simulations that enable them to take consequential actions in a familiar context and see the results. This can be achieved through reduced-form models with appropriate user interfaces, but it is a significant challenge to construct a system capable of producing educational models of socio-environmental systems that are localizable and customizable but accessible to educators and learners. In this paper, we present <i>iPlan</i>, a free, online educational software application designed to enable educators and middle- and high-school-aged learners to create custom, localized land-use simulations that can be used to frame, explore, and address complex land-use problems. We describe in detail the software application and its underlying computational models, and we present robust evidence that the accuracy of <i>iPlan</i> simulations is appropriate for educational contexts and preliminary evidence that educators are able to produce simulations suitable for their pedagogical goals and learner populations.