Teaching Resources
A collection of materials from my time teaching introductory economics at Northeastern University. These include classroom games, lecture slides, and worksheets. The slides and worksheets are older but still functional if you are teaching a standard Principles course and want some ideas.
Classroom Games
Economics lends itself to in-class games better than most subjects. Incentives, constraints, trade-offs are easy to imitate in a classroom setting with a few clever approaches.
Attending a workshop discussion on using quick games in the classroom as a useful learning activity a few weeks ago prompted me to formally write all of this up. These activities are simple, practical, and have been mostly adapted from other economists and my own professors from when I was a student. They are designed to make core economic concepts a little concrete for students through a little hand-on experience. The act of making choices in the classroom given the incentives and constraints, and then reflecting on the outcomes and interaction with other students (economic agents) is a great way to see how some of economics in action in real-time.
The write-ups include setup instructions, materials, how to run the debrief, and notes on class size. They are detailed enough that another instructor could pick them up and run them without having seen them before.
Read the full classroom games write-up →
The five games covered:
The Candy Game: Marginal utility and diminishing returns. Students rate their happiness after each successive piece of candy and are quick to understand what diminishing marginal utility is after the fourth Starburst, or tenth M&M.
Mixers or Butter: This multi period (could be multiple classes or several rounds in a given class) game of production possibility frontier and opportunity cost allows students to sketch their own PPFs and make allocation decisions.
The Iced Tea Experiment: Demand, willingness to pay, and a starting point to discuss demand shifters. A live classroom market where students reveal their own demand curves and we construct it together on a board.
Tragedy of the Commons: Externalities and market failure. A fishing game to demonstrate how individual rational decisions can lead to bad outcomes for society, and then asking students to brainstorm solutions on trying to correct for it.
The Voting Game: Median voter theorem, ranked choice voting, and political economy. Works well as either an opener or a capstone for a unit on public choice.
For context on why these work pedagogically and the framework behind them, see the companion post: Games as a way to teach concepts in class.
Lecture Slides: Principles of Macro (Summer 2019)
These are slides from a Principles of Macro course at Northeastern. I used them with an iPad, annotating and drawing on them live in class rather than working from a static deck. They are organized by topic below. Some are more polished than others.
Micro foundations: Opportunity cost and markets (Lectures 2–6)
Lecture 2 — PPC and Opportunity Cost · Lecture 3 — Demand and Supply · Lecture 4 — Supply · Lecture 5 — Markets · Lecture 6 — Market Failure
Macroeconomic theory (Lectures 7–15)
Lecture 7 — GDP · Lecture 8 — Standards of Living · Lecture 9 — Circular Flow · Lecture 10 — Business Cycles · Lecture 11 — AD/AS · Lecture 12 — AD/AS and Growth · Lecture 13 — Unemployment · Lecture 15 — Inflation
Money, banking and stabilization policy (Lectures 17–22)
Lecture 17 — Money and Banks · Lecture 18 — The Federal Reserve · Lecture 19 — Monetary Policy · Lecture 20 — Fiscal Policy · Lecture 21 — Recessions · Lecture 22 — The Great Recession
The open economy (Lectures 23–24)
Lecture 23 — International Trade · Lecture 24 — Trade and Exchange Rates
Worksheets: Principles of Macro (Fall 2017)
Weekly worksheets from an earlier version of the Principles Macro course. I used these as in-class diagnostics — students worked through them first to surface what they knew and didn’t, then we used them as a springboard for discussion. They are basic but still useful for that purpose.
Week 1 — PPC · Week 2 — The Market · Week 3 — Externalities · Week 3 — GDP · Week 4 — Circular Flow and Unemployment · Week 5 — Inflation · Week 6 — AD and AS