3 new tools for Econ Teaching
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
A while back, I posted about my Economics of Crime simulator, which was my first proper experience of building an app to teach a topic. At the time, I think the realisation that hit me was that building an app was now easier than the next best tool, which I had planned as a spreadsheet. I'm okay at excel, but there were a few things I knew I would have to figure out to make it work the way I wanted. If I was going to have to figure out stuff anyway, it made sense to figure out vibe coding and end up with a better end product.
The second stage of realisation was much bigger for me. I wanted to show some increases and decreases of economic welfare at different quantities, and I found that building the app was quicker than making the tool I wanted in Powerpoint. This was big because I consider myself to be a pretty competent Powerpoint user; I absolutely knew how to get the result I wanted in Powerpoint and have a bunch of add-ins to make the process a bit quicker. However, even with my Powerpoint superpowers, I could see that it was going to be a fiddly task, especially if I wanted to be able to show a few variations. Building the app, however, was pretty painless, and now building an app to illustrate stuff is now a viable alternative to a trusty Powerpoint, and is often more flexible.
Economic welfare tool
Welfare, consumer and producer surplus, and especially welfare loss, are topics that are really powerful, but students often struggle with them because of the marginal element. They'll happily tell you that "cost greater than benefit is bad", but the idea that we keep gaining welfare as long as benefits exceed costs (and that we should keep consuming right up to the point where they meet) doesn't always click. Foregone welfare, in particular, is a slippery thing to grasp.
I wanted an easier way to show all of this visually, and especially to show that where marginal cost is greater than marginal benefit, we lose welfare. The tool lets me do that flexibly. I can switch between representations, so I can show it as marginal cost and marginal benefit, or flip into demand and supply with consumer and producer surplus. That flexibility helps me build flexible understanding in students too.
I also like that you can build on it to show why externalities cause welfare loss. Students are generally quite good at seeing why over-consumption is a problem, but the under-consumption case is harder, because that idea of foregone welfare keeps coming back to bite us. Once students get this, the over and under consumption framing really starts to land, and they begin to see how the free market does, on paper, work pretty well. We are very good at teaching how markets fail, but until students understand that, I don't think they always appreciate how markets work, with supply meeting demand at the point where welfare is maximised, all through the magical power of demand and supply.
Monetary policy transmission mechanism
The next tool I made was for walking students through the monetary policy transmission mechanism. There's a complex version and a stripped-back one, so I can choose what to throw at them depending on the group, and I can move with what students are suggesting rather than being locked into one fixed diagram. It's been really useful for teacher explanation, where I want to talk through the chain of causation without students drowning in detail straight away.
Circular flow tool
I know there are a couple of MONIAC-style tools floating around online, but I wanted one that fitted with what we actually teach at A-Level and that wasn't using an unnecessarily complicated diagram. One of the things I find with circular flow is that students can stress too much about exactly where each channel goes. The truth is that there are three external channels feeding into the internal system, and where you draw them in doesn't really matter. (Although I do quite like it when they don't cross over.)
What I think this tool does well is highlight how the marginal propensity to consume and the marginal propensity to withdraw drive the multiplier process. Students will often learn the formula without really linking those things together, but if you can see it happening visually, it becomes a really powerful tool for analysis and evaluation.
The hardest bit to show is the impact of a withdrawal, because you're trying to picture money that would have been spent, or would have been saved. The tool handles that with little ghost coins, which I'm quite pleased with.
Where this leaves us
We are entering a really interesting period in education. Teachers can now build pretty serviceable bespoke tools fairly quickly, and tailored to exactly what we want students to see. If you fancy having a go yourself, this TeachEdge post walks through building an interactive in Google AI Studio in about 15 minutes (with an A-Level Economics example, which is a bonus!).