Category: Economics

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The Marshmallow Tower Game

Along the lines of my last post, I’ve tweaked another game that I have used previously — the marshmallow challenge. My goal was to illustrate how economic development can be considered a collective action problem in which trust plays a key role. Here are the rules of the game:

  • Each team has 18 minutes to build a tower topped by a marshmallow using the materials provided.
  • The members of the team that builds the tallest tower earn 25 points each.
  • A “Red” player secretly placed on your team gets 25 points if their real team wins.
  • If a team correctly identifies its Red player, each team member wins 25 points. Only one guess per team.

The debriefing discussion included my brief description of Rousseau’s stag hunt scenario, and these questions:

  • If one considers the height of a tower as an indicator of a society’s level of economic development, why did some societies (teams) develop more quickly than others?
  • Did cultural values promote trust among team members?
  • What was in each person’s best interest? Were these interests achieved?
  • How did having a Red on your team affect your team’s behavior?
  • Who do you think the Reds were? Why?
  • How does it feel to be accused of being a Red?

At the very end of the discussion, I revealed that there were no Red players.

The class had ten students that I divided into three teams. One team’s tower collapsed when time expired, but none of the teams exhibited a high degree of dysfunction due to suspicions about the identity of its Red player. As usual, I think the game would work better in a class with more students.

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Social Capital and M&Ms

Social capital is a “fuzzy” concept but serves as the foundation for some key comparative politics theories that we cover in my Introduction to Comparative Politics course. To help my students get a better grasp of the concept, I borrowed an activity from economics: the ultimatum game.

Briefly, I have the students pair up and distribute a handout to keep track of offers in the game. The students first need to allocate roles: proposer and responder. I tell them that the student whose middle name starts with an earlier letter in the alphabet is the proposer, just to randomize it somewhat. The proposer makes an offer of a division of some resource. Because candy is a (near) universal motivator, I use M&Ms and Skittles (I let the pairs decide which candy to play for, but I like to offer skittles for lactose-free students). I distribute 50 candies per pair and they play 5 rounds; in each round, the proposer makes an offer to split 10 candies. The responder can only accept or reject the offer. If the responder rejects, neither get any (they go back to me). If the responder accepts, then they divide the candy.

Continue reading “Social Capital and M&Ms”

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More Changes to a Course on Development, Part 3

The final exam for this course last year asked each student to write an economic rationale in support of one of two policy options, using information from course readings as evidence. Generally students students did not do well on the exam, mainly because they did not discuss applicable concepts like moral hazard and discounting the future. These concepts were found in several course readings and discussed in class. While I didn’t explicitly mention these concepts in the exam prompt, the benefits of including them in the rationale should have been obvious given course content.

Now I’m thinking of a question like this for the final exam:

What has a greater influence on economic development in Egypt: law (institutions) or geography (luck)? Why?

In your answer, reference the items below and relevant course readings listed in the syllabus:

The downside here is that I’m giving up an authentic writing exercise in favor of (I assume) even more transparent alignment with course objectives.

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More Changes to a Course on Development, Part 2

My original design for this course included a design thinking component organized in two stages. In the first stage, teams applied SCAMPER to California Water Crisis, a freeware board game. Although the subject of water scarcity was quite relevant to the course, the game’s mechanics were not the most engaging. This should have made it easy for students to think of significant SCAMPER-based improvements, but their recommended changes were relatively superficial. The graded writing assignment tied to this activity also left much to be desired.

In the second stage, students were asked to apply SCAMPER to an existing game other than California Water Crisis. Two problems popped up here. First, teams chose very simple games to modify — think Chutes and Ladders (and without even any awareness of its Indian origins or its connection to British imperialism). Second, although I specifically directed them to place the new game in a specific context, like a city, this didn’t happen.

This time around, I’ll be having students play Stop Disasters and Wingspan. Teams will have to apply SCAMPER to one of these two games. Although they both connect well to the course’s subject, neither game is ideal. Stop Disasters is problematic because it is Flash-based. Wingspan requires, where I work, a significant departmental budget outlay of $100 per game, and I have to purchase five of them. Given the dimensions of Wingspan’s box, transporting all five at once could be a problem. The campus building in which I work is not ADA-compliant (my office, perhaps appropriately, is at the top of what originally was the servants’ stairwell).

Instead of selecting something different for the second design round, teams will stick with whichever of the two games they chose for the first round. While students will be free to choose any subject related to the course for the new game they are designing, it will have to be set in the city in which the university is located. I hope to locate some online data visualizations — maps of flood zones, public transportation routes, property tax assessments, etc. — to help students with this.

After the initial SCAMPER-based redesign, each team will play another team’s game. In an individual writing assignment, students will evaluate the games they played according to the game design principles referenced in the same assignment from last year. I will provide each team with the feedback it receives from the other students.

For the next phase, teams will, I hope, use SCAMPER as a means of applying feedback to improve their game designs. Then there will be another round of play testing, with another written evaluation. I might make this second evaluation a mechanism by which teams earn points on the quality of their games, as assessed by other students. That could heighten students’ investment in the design process. I will probably also need to include a means for students to evaluate the work of their teammates on this project over the semester — something I do regularly in my other courses.

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More Changes to a Course on Development, Part 1

The coming fall semester marks the second iteration of my “new” course on economic development and environmental politics. In the spirit of continuous improvement, I am making more changes. The complete original series of posts on how I built the course is here.

I am reducing my learning objectives slightly by eliminating an assignment on market externalities. I might return to the topic in the future, but last year I was not able to do it justice. Given the overall architecture of the course, it fell into the category of “what students don’t absolutely need.” I can keep it in my back pocket as something I can always lecture about at an appropriate time.

I am keeping the meta-prompts for assignments because, in my opinion, they serve as cues to students about the learning objectives. I don’t have any direct evidence that the meta-prompts actually register in students’ minds, but they might help.

As previously discussed, in-class quizzes did not work well. Students performed poorly on them, they consumed an excessive amount of classroom time, and they were a pain for me to grade. This time the quizzes will be timed at ten minutes, reside on our Canvas LMS, and consist of machine-graded multiple choice questions. I’ll have immediate feedback on students’ understanding and will be able to revisit subjects as needed. Each quiz is scheduled for the class after the corresponding learning objective has concluded.

In my next post, I’ll discuss changes to the design thinking aspect of the course.

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Identifying a Generational Zeitgeist?

Sometimes you discover something completely unexpected about how people perceive the world.

Back in February, students in my globalization course read the items below and wrote a response to “Is global trade a zero sum game — a process that causes some people to get poorer while others get richer? Why?”

  • Daron Acemoglu, “Economic Inequality and Globalization,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 13, 1 (Fall/Winter 2006).
  • Joseph Stiglitz, “The Globalization of Our Discontent,” Project Syndicate, 5 December 2017.
  • Branko Milanovic, “Why the Global 1% and the Asian Middle Class Have Gained the Most from Globalization,” Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 13 May 2016.

Nearly the entire class wrote that global trade is a zero sum game. In class, students advocated for trade barriers.

Continue reading “Identifying a Generational Zeitgeist?”
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To Quiz or Not to Quiz, Part 3

Some final thoughts on adding in-class quizzes to my course on economic development:

For six of the nine quizzes administered so far, students answered only half of the questions correctly. Given the results of my survey on students’ study habits, I am increasingly convinced that the problem of transfer is contributing to their poor performance. Perhaps I should create a series of real world-based practice exercises for next year’s iteration of this course. These exercises could be an additional connection to the reading assignments.

Even though each quiz has a maximum of four questions, the quiz-taking eats up a significant amount of classroom time. Perhaps I should impose a time limit. If I put the quizzes online for completion outside of class, students will be able to search for correct answers, which defeats my purpose of testing recall to strengthen memory.

The quizzes have helped me identify what students still don’t know. Reviewing questions in class after grading each quiz might have helped students better understand the concepts that they had been tested on. But the final exam that I created for the course (Part 8 below) will allow me to only indirectly infer whether this occurred. Maybe next year I should repeat some of the same questions across multiple quizzes, or introduce summative exams, to get a better idea of whether students are in fact learning what they are being quizzed about.

Links to the original series on redesigning this course:

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Changing a Course on Development, Part 8

I want my final exam for this course to be its pièce de résistance — a vehicle for students to demonstrate how well they can apply their knowledge about the relationships between economics and the environment. I also want the application of knowledge to happen in an authentic, real-world context, where writing has a clearly-defined role, audience, purpose, and format. So here is the exam:

A Plan for Louisiana’s Future

Role

You are the Director of the Office of Planning and Budget for the State of Louisiana.

Audience

The governor of Louisiana

Purpose

Recommend to the governor whether Louisiana should either:

  1. Raise taxes to build the southern part of the state to a 10,000 year flood standard, or
  2. Stop all public infrastructure spending in areas unprotected by existing levees.

These are your only policy options. Write a 2-3 page rationale for choosing one of them. Discuss why your choice is economically best for the state. For evidence in support of your rationale, refer to relevant course readings and Continue reading “Changing a Course on Development, Part 8”

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Changing a Course on Development, Part 7

I’ve been a fan of the quality of failure essay since Amanda introduced me to it several years ago, and I’ve tweaked it several times with varying degrees of success. In an attempt to avoid a mistake I made with it last semester, I have altered the assignment yet again by shortening the instructions considerably:

Read:

In a 2-3 page essay, analyze how you learned in this course. What actions helped or hurt your learning? Which components of the course most enabled you to better understand ideas or apply them in new ways?

Note that I have moved significantly away from the assignment’s original theme of failure. I am doing this for two reasons. First, in other courses this assignment has produced a lot of commentary from students about what I will label the superficial aspects of failure — as in “at the beginning of the semester I promised myself that I would get an A++ on every assignment but I failed at this because I didn’t manage my time well.” Second, I am curious to find out whether students regard the SCAMPER-based game design exercises as worthwhile, but I’m not going to influence their thoughts by explicitly asking about it.

Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course:

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Changing a Course on Development, Part 6

My general approach to teaching is to emphasize the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Creation and evaluation are important. Memorization, not so much. While game design gives students the opportunity to create something connected to course content, they should also evaluate whether what they’ve created is on target. So, as promised in my last post, here is the relevant assignment, due after students play the games that they have designed:

1. Read the rubric below.

2. In the form of a 3-4 page, double-spaced essay, evaluate the game you played that was designed by another team. How well did the game:

Work independently, do not discuss your essay with other students.

Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course: