The Building Blocks of Foundational Economics
A lesson in scarcity, choice and opportunity cost using Duplo
In a recent Year 11 Economics lesson, students embarked on a hands-on journey to understand the fundamental economic concepts of scarcity, choice, and opportunity cost. The classroom transformed into a mini manufacturing hub, where the simple act of building cars and trucks with children's Duplo blocks illuminated the complexities of economic decision-making.
The objective was clear: to teach students how scarcity forces us to make choices, leading to the inevitable reality of opportunity cost.
The tool of choice? My kids' Duplo set. Each student was given the task of manufacturing cars or trucks, with prototypes provided for guidance.
The catch? The resources – representing land, labour, capital, and enterprise – were limited. In our case, the fossil-fuel derived Duplo blocks (land), the students making the cars and trucks (labour), capital (the tables they were working on perhaps) and enterprise (their ideas about how to most efficiently organise the other factors of production to produce the desired output).
As the lesson unfolded, the students were not directed to build one type of vehicle over the other. This freedom mirrored real-world economic scenarios where choices are abundant, but resources are not. The students dived into the task, some opting for cars requiring four blocks, others for trucks needing eight.
In about five minutes, the manufacturing frenzy subsided. The result was a tally of 34 cars and 29 trucks. Interestingly, some students ventured beyond the prototypes, adding their flair to the designs, while others left resources unused – a total of 17 blocks lay idle.
This outcome was then translated onto the board as a Production Possibility Frontier (PPF), a concept central to understanding economic efficiency and trade-offs
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We explored how the trade-off between car and truck production resulted in our specific output. Hypothetically, if all resources were diverted to truck production, the 34 cars could be converted into an additional 17 trucks. This led to a deeper discussion: What happens to those employed in the car manufacturing sector if such a shift occurs?
Equally, what happens if this micro-economy decided to devote all resources to car production? Would the workers in the truck manufacturing sector all be going broke?
Realistically, their skills might have been transferable to either, but it did shine a light on the potential externalities that were involved with this sort of economic decision-making when even the simplest of choices - car or truck - was given.
So, we learned that every economic choice has an opportunity cost. The decision to produce one good over another, in our case, cars over trucks or vice versa, incurs a cost – the loss of what could have been produced instead. This concept resonated with the students, as they connected the dots between theoretical economics and tangible outcomes.
The lesson was a success, not just in terms of understanding economic principles, but in engaging students with a practical, hands-on approach. It highlighted the importance of how we can bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. As the students left the classroom, they carried with them a newfound appreciation for the complexities of economic decision-making, a testament to the power of interactive learning in the field of economics.
In our course “Strategies for Effective Economics Education”, we address these and other simulations in Section III of the course. A fun one looking at the Law of Diminishing Returns has the students create paper chains in timed conditions using a fixed set of capital resources but by adding one additional labour resource each run of the simulation. Non-producers are tasked with timing and graphing the total output and we plot the results on a Google Sheet to produce a graph that looks like this:
Learn more about the course here, and the 6 hours of NESA Accredited training you can receive from taking the course!