Christmas Market
At the beginning of the term, we were brought to the occupied stairs. We were all very excited at the beginning, as it was a new, fun project. However, this was before we were brought to the horrors of the markets, and the challenges and pain that we would face in this project.
Education
Humanities
In humanities, we had been learning about economics so that we would be prepared for the Christmas markets. We learnt about the 6 economic principles: Scarcity, Making Choices, Specialisation, Interdependence, Allocation and Markets and Living Standards. This was very relevant to our Christmas Markets project. We had to see which resources were scarce, and so make our products as so. Our most scarce resources were Liquid assets (capital), human resources (labour), and time. We had to make choices, or opportunity cost. This is when we had to make choices between multiple options, mostly between either having something very good quality or making something cheaper. We had to use specialisation, by seeing what each of our members specialises in, mostly that Owen has a 3-D Printer. We had to use many of these skills which came in very handy when we had to do the Christmas Markets. Thank you, Mr. Wong! We also played this game called Skeleton Island, where there were buyers and sellers. The buyers had to buy certain materials to survive, and whoever survived the longest won. The sellers had the materials, and they got to choose their prices. The seller with the most money. I was a seller, and I managed to make $210! In the end, we also had to do a in class reflection on the Christmas Markets, in which we had to use that economic vocabulary.
Production
Making our Products
For the weeks coming up the Christmas markets, Owen and I were working very hard on making our products. I had designed some of our products on the online CAD website, Onshape, whereas Owen was printing them on his 3-D printer. Then, when he had finished the printing, he gave them back to me and I packaged the products. We did this with all our products, until we finally finished a few days before the markets. We hid a few bumps a long the way, with limited resources, and with us running out of time, but we used the All-Saints’ capability of Resilience and Problem Solving to get out of our pickle, and to get back on track.
Prototypes Design
We needed to present our prototypes in front of the class, and pitch our idea. We made the prototypes of a Roman Arch (which we didn’t sell), F-Puzzle, Reindeer Hanger and Soma Cube. Luckily, our pitch was accepted and we were allowed to continue to making our products.
Education
English
English was also related to the Christmas Markets. We did a Christmas market poster in English, using different visual techniques to make a good poster that appeals to our key demographic. We then had to write a TEEL structured paragraph entailing how our poster used visual techniques and explains our poster in depth. Our poster was then put on the board outside the Canteen so that others could see our products and so they could see what we were selling. Lastly, we then put our posters on our table so that people would be attracted to our tables.
Finally…
The Market
On the day of the Christmas Markets, there was a lot of buzz, but everyone was a bit discouraged because we didn’t get to be on the common, but we were on the Veranda. However, at the beginning, we had a bit of an issue.
We were in front of a pillar, and the groups next to us didn’t want to move just for us. So, we had to move to the other side of the common when the markets had already begun. We had missed the main rush of the markets, which was sad as that’s when we would have made most of our sales. On top of that, we had just moved from a prime location to a sort of ‘dead zone’. This was a setback, but we remained optimistic. We had only a few sells, when we made a deal with the mathematics department to sells some of our products, although they still ripped us off. We made quite a bit of money in the end, with a total revenue of $102.50 and a profit of $74.28, which we were happy with (there is a chance that when you are reading this, the profit is more as we are getting sells after the markets as well).
Please find below our excel spreadsheet
Ahh very knowledgeable