Overview
This term for InnovatED, we were brought to the occupied stairs to learn and think about the Christmas markets. We were all incredibly excited and couldn’t wait to start until we started. Your group is given $30 as a loan to make and produce multiple products that would be legible to be able to sell and make a profit. All of the earnings would go to a charity.
Economics – Humanities
During humanities this term we have been learning about economics. We have been learning about the 6 economic principles. Demand, scarcity, supply, making choices, allocation and living standards. We also learned about different types of pricing strategies, and when and how to apply them. To better understand some of these concepts we played a game called skeleton island. Skeleton Island is a humanities game that mainly focuses on supply, demand and scarcity. There would be 6 sellers, and the rest of the people would be buyers. The sellers had 3 different types of products to sell. Water – 20 bottles, Fishing rod – 3 and Insect Repellent – 1. Each buyer would have 2 minutes for one day, and on the first day would need at least one of each item from any seller of their choice. Since water had a lot of supply, it was not a scarce resource and didn’t have much demand. This means that most people would sell it for a cheap price, like $2. On the other hand, insect repellent and fishing rod were much scarcer, had no supply and was in a lot of demand, making them a lot more expensive than water. Fortunately, I was the winning buyer as I had connections to some of the sellers as some of them were my friends. Thanks to Owen, I won due to a variety of things. The prices were incredibly cheap compared to other sellers, he also gave me a subscription that for $5, I would get water each day, for 19 days. This was a deal that I could not pass on. Since Owen was scamming himself, he wasn’t very successful as a seller. At the end of the markets, we had a test for a reflection on the markets, and we had to use and talk about the economic principles and use economic vocabulary.
English
For the Christmas Markets in English, we needed to make posters to advertise our products. We needed to create a visually appealing poster that didn’t sell the actual product, but ‘sold the idea’. To do this well, we needed to use all of the visual techniques and allure our target audience. After we had created some posters, we put them on a board for other people to see, and as an advertisement. We also needed to decorate our tables, so we put posters on them and added other things to make them seem visually pleasing to attract customers.
Production
Trent and I decided to make a tangram puzzle. A tangram is where there are different shapes, that all together would fit in a square (or any other shape, like this one on the right). Trent, fortunately, had most of the products at home for this, and his dad was able to help us to cut the products. We had bought some plywood, which would be what we would make the puzzles out of. I had some brushes, paint and Christmas wrapping paper which was also quite useful. We also had to buy some super glue for putting the frame together.
Prototypes
For our original product to first become approved, we needed to present the product to the class and Mr Wong. We built a prototype to show we could actually produce the product (although the prototype was not that good). In our presentation, we needed to include things like the cost price of all our items and projected profit and loss. From here, Mr Wong was able to determine if our business would be successful or a failure.
Digital Tech
For our digital tech assessment, we needed to make a spreadsheet where we were able to calculate all our sales with Profit/Loss. This spreadsheet, later on, was very useful on the actual market day for keeping track of sales and money.
Christmas Markets
On the actual day of the Christmas markets, things weren’t going too well. We had only made 2 sales in 10 minutes and not many people seemed interested in buying our products. Luckily, Ms Rees (one of the math teachers) had seen our product and told us we should to the head of mathematics since they like our products. They wanted 12 of our products for $30, which were originally selling at $5 each. Trent and I thought hard about the decision because we were kind of getting scammed, but we went with it since we didn’t know if we would make a profit if we waited and sold our products normally. All in all, the markets didn’t seem like too much of a failure as we made a profit of $44.70 and revenue of $77.70.
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