Saturday School

As part of the extra curricular activities at school the second graders had extra Saturday classes. All of the second grade teachers (plus me) were asked to come up with an 80 minute class and the student would then choose a class to attend.

Because I only usually teach the kids from class 2-7 I didn’t want English to be the focus of my lesson and I finally got to try an activity I’ve been itching to do since I got here.

When I was in high school and at university I played “The International Trade Game”. It’s a team building game focusing on communication and I know that it is used in Economic theory and a lot of companies also use it as part of their training schemes.

Here is the basic idea. Teams are competing against each other to draw and cut out shapes. Each shape is worth a certain amount of money. The team that makes the most money wins. Very simple!

But then you hand out the materials and things go crazy.
Team A has pencils, scissors but no paper.
Team B has one pencil, one pair of scissors and four sheets of paper.
Team C has twenty sheets of paper.
Now they realize they have to trade materials and work together!!

After they have been playing for about 15 minutes you can also throw in a few extra things i.e. if everyone is making triangles then you drop the reward for triangles. I also had extra scissors and pencils which I sold for ridiculous prices to encourage team work between the groups and I offered small rewards for small shapes to see if groups would use up the paper they were wasting.

After letting them make shapes for about 40 minutes I stopped the game and the teams counted their money to find the winner. I wanted to explain in detail about the game and so Minika came along to translate for me as I’m sure some of the explanations would’ve been too difficult in English.

Here is what it’s all about. The game reflects the world markets. Team A represents developed countries like America with lots of technology but scarce natural resources. Team B represents countries with a bit of both and Team C represents third world countries.

The prices of the shapes are determined by supply and demand just like a real market which is why the prices change and I introduced the smaller shapes to make the students think about waste. Most groups decided it was too much effort to make small shapes and chased the big money – just like in real life!
The students enjoyed the game and seemed interested in the discussions. Having played the game at home I was interested to see how Japanese students would play the game and if there would be any major differences – there were!

* Japanese students are nice! Team C should realize how valuable paper is and charge a lot of money for it. I was charging $1000 for one sheet so they could’ve easily charged $500. At home they did but in Japan they were nice and gave it away!
* At home scissors are valuable as you need to cut out the shapes. In Japan the kids are such expert paper folders and tear-ers that they could tear the paper and it looked so neat. We let it slide for the first class but not for the second!
* In most cases Team B wins because they start out with a little of everything and get a good head start. However Team A won the first class in Japan!
* In a bullying tactic (ironic as it was Team A – America) some of the girls found a novel use for the waste paper and started writing out free massage and free golf lesson tickets in return for paper!

I thoroughly enjoyed playing the game and thanks to Minika for being my little helper! I can’t wait to do it again next year!