Dhaka Economist

I went to a workshop called Let’s Play: Designing and Using Games in Your Classroom, led by Dr. Tamara Stenn this week. Organized by the Suffolk’s Center for Teaching and Scholarly Excellence and it was quite an illuminating experience, and in a way quite validating. I have always enjoyed and used little games in classroom to liven up the classroom. The interactive and experiential element is always great for learning.

So, it was wonderful to see someone else advocating and building far more elaborate games in class. Sitting there, I kept recognizing things I do, but what was interesting was how well organized and structured Tamara’s games are. And well thought out. Most of the activities I arrange for the students in the classroom evolved through trial and error over a few years of teaching principles courses at Northeastern and reading about other people’s experiences introducing similar Economics games in class. But this workshop provided a wonderful framework tied to theory on what works, and it pushed me to finally write up and think a little more about my own in-class games.

The framework? It’s Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. It’s quite a useful way to think about what a well-designed classroom activity actually does.

The key takeaway is that it explains why stopping at just the game is a job half-done. The experience is just stage one. The learning payoff is in the processing — the moment when students look back at what they just did and connect it to what they are studying. And that’s when learning comes full-circle.

Economics lends itself to these kinds of games in-class more than most subjects. Incentives, constraints, trading and trade-offs can be thoughtfully designed from abstract concepts to simple and intuitive demonstrations using games for a fun 15 to 20 minute activity. Here are five games I’ve used in introductory economics courses, and if you want to read a little more about them, follow the link. They are written up with enough detail that someone else could easily introduce them in the classroom too.

Sure, after 4 years of silence, it feels a little strange to write posts on a schedule, but as I spend time thinking and charting on what I want to do here, I feel like writing an update will help solidify my thoughts too. So this post is about what we’re doing now that we’re here.

When I started this site in 2017, it was mostly a place to think out loud about economics and occasionally complain about ISPs and how corporate profit maximization and rent seeking behavior can reduce social welfare. The tagline was accurate but vague, because I did not wish to constrain myself or set goals.

That’s still sort of true. But there are things that I want to write in a structured fashion now. And I will elaborate on that below.

Higher Ed is where a lot of my professional focus has been these past few years. After all, I work in institutional research at a university. If you need an introduction or refresher, this means we’re the people who do research for the university, on the university. It’s a strange and underappreciated corner of higher education, and it gives me a particular insight on the questions that are being discussed more and more: what is the future of higher education? How will the demographic shift affect colleges and universities? Especially small tuition dependent colleges? What is the value of a college degree? I’ll be writing more of that here, and some of it will be more formal – not just thoughts and discussions, but some questions that will turn into research.

There’s a Higher Ed section where I will chronicle a running list of these discussions. It’s a little empty, but it will start populating soon.

However what I also enjoy a lot, and haven’t had a chance to do much of recently, is to teach. And that is where the second structured bit of writing will show up. The microeconomics series started because this teaching instinct won’t leave me alone. I have taught principles of Micro and Macro at Northeastern, but if given the choice, I prefer teaching micro just a little more. One of the things I have always noticed with my students is that they connect better with real world concepts. If you look at my past exercises and slides, you will see my take on it – and it’s really a hodge podge of things. Pop culture and popular TV shows, current affairs, scenarios from fiction, and so on. This particular series will have a more thorough focus on the education market. Education is a remarkably good case study for almost every core microeconomic idea – from demand and supply curves, market structure, price discrimination, externalities to more complex ideas like information and public economics. So, I have sketched out a 15-chapter series using higher education as the running example throughout that I plan to write out.

It’s not really a textbook. Not yet. Each chapter will be relatively short and focused.

You can start here.