Economics of Castle Design
In World History we were learning about life in the middle ages. We created a castle using a budget with a small group of other students. We had to purchase parts for the castle from a list. The castle had to show all of the lines of defense in the medieval times. We learned about the castles and multiple types of defense tactics. We learned about.
Economics-
Law of supply and demand: The parts we had to budget for would change on the "stores" availability and how many of each part were selling.
Law of demand: The higher the price of the good that people buy, the less people will demand that good.
The law of elasticity: We learned that some items sell regardless of the price, when the price of glue tripled it still sold.
Law of utility: An economic term referring to the total satisfaction received from consuming a good or service. For example, we purchased crenellations as defense rather than trees because defense was more important than decoration.
Law of Diminishing Utility: As the number of units of a good or service increases, the unity gained out of these additional units' decreases. Example: 1st arrow slit good, 2nd arrow slit good… but not as important as the first!
After we did all of our note taking and research we got a list of materials and we had to draw many drafts with our group to some to an agreement of a castle that followed all of the requirements and fit with our budget.
My group spent most of our time fighting in the beginning because we were over budget and our castle still wasn't done. We had to get a budget extension and had to learn to use effective communication. We pretty much stopped fighting after we learned to compromise and communicate.
My biggest take-away from this project was that life does have budgets and you will not always have a budget extension. Our teacher reminded us that it was a good lesson to learn because it was "fake money", he had learned this lesson with real money.
As you can see in my artifact this is one of the ideas that we had that we kept and based out castle off of. Here we really used creativity because we had to creatively design our own castle and our knowledge of the castle defense systems to create this. I am also showing the parts list so that you can see every decision we had to make.
As you can see in my artifact is the completed version of the castle. Here we used collaboration because we all had to contribute to the construction of the castle, we also used our knowledge of the law of elasticity because while assembling the castles the hot glue was running out/ low so they went from free to $400 to $2,000. So we had to choose someone with a delicate touch so we could use the least amount of glue possible and still make it work. This can be a lesson for real like because sometimes an item is needed regardless of price. Gasoline… so we just have to conserve how much we used just like we conserved our glue!
