Playdoh Economics!

Who said playdoh was only for young children? I use playdoh early on in the course when we are covering basic economic concepts such as scarcity, factors of production and sectors of the economy. Although these are new concepts to many in the class, quite a lot of the students have done them before so I use the playdoh to keep them engaged with the topics.

After we have covered the theory, I split the class into groups and hand out each group a few different colours of playdoh. Their task is to create some sort of production scene and then describe it to me in terms of the the theory they have just learnt, for example the capital resource used is the hammer , the labour resource is the builder, it is an activity in the secondary sector etc etc. I usually award a small prize to the group that has the best looking scene AND can use it to describe at least five economic concepts.

Here are a couple of this year’s efforts.