Sep 28, 2009

From the Classroom

I am certainly not an economist or "master teacher", but one of the great things about being more comfortable with the material is that you can begin to bring in more and more of the intricacies of economics into the classroom. In the past couple of years I have had a great time discussing more game theory in my regular econ classes.

I started with "The Prisoner's Dilemma" (Lesson 14 in Focus: High School Economics), then started incorporating this cartel game into our discussions of colluding oligopolies. Now I plan on incorporating "The Ultimatum Game", which I saw demonstrated in an FTE workshop several years ago.

The gist of this lesson is to see if markets promote ethical behavior or not. Give these a shot in your classroom and I think you will find them to be well worth the time and effort.

-Melvin