Interactive Electronic Textbook
The center for economic education at the University of Siegen developed the prototype of an interactive, electronic textbook on types of markets forms. The app links the teacher’s and the students’ tablets. Thereby the mobile devices can interact with each other. The app is available for the most used operating systems.
Pit Market
In the pit market experiment a homogeneous good is traded between sellers and buyers. They have to keep in mind predefined reservation prices when undertaking market transactions.
Before the actual market experiment, the lecturer informs students about the overall course of actions, determines a type of market and the required amount of buyers and sellers. Students log on to the pit market app and choose the market generated by the lecturer. The app automatically assigns each student a role of either buyer or seller and displays a corresponding role description.
After students have read the role descriptions, the lecturer starts the market experiment. Students roam around in the room freely as they have to find a market partner bearing in mind the requirements on production costs and use stated in their role descriptions. For that end three views are available in the app: in the first one, students can execute a transaction.
To this end the player has to find a market partner and bargain over a price with him. In case they agree, they buyer scans the QR code on the vendor’s tablet with his own tablet and thus finishes the transaction. After that, a feedback is displayed on the students’ tablet informing them on their benefits and restating their price. In a second view students can follow the other market transactions on a graph displaying the actual supply and demand curve of the course. One dot represents one transaction; transactions of the player itself are highlighted. By touching a dot information to single transactions are displayed on the screen. After the game, when the lecturer has closed the market, results are discussed in class using a data projector displaying single transactions and the entire supply and demand curves.
In order not to stop at data collection and processing, a discussion about market transactions is required. “Who would trade more goods at a price of 5 Euros? Sellers or buyers?”
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Word Now
The game Word Now is similar to the party game “Taboo”. In small groups students practice, learn and test their technical vocabulary of a given topic.
The game has several purposes: apply technical vocabulary, use idle time in class and cognitive activation such as remembering, concluding, solving problems and speech comprehension.
The students get together in groups. It is two against two. One of the students within a team is the describer. He is shown a word as well as five words to help him describe it. The describer now needs to explain the word to his teammate who is trying to guess the word at the same time. The other group members check the use of the words that are there to help. This way the technical vocabulary is connected to each other and used in context.
Contact
Dipl.-Gyml. Manuel Froitzheim (froitzheim@zoebis.de)