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- Building knowledge by building paper airplanes
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Building knowledge by building paper airplanes
By Kimberly Sloan
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| Students Zane Brewer, Donovan Whisler and Britney Fry flying paper airplanes |
Throwing paper air planes in class has been a longstanding image associated with bored students, but in Muscatine Community College (MCC) instructor John Dabeet’s Microeconomics course, folding paper planes is part of the curriculum.
On March 28, Microeconomics students made paper planes as part of a group activity to learn about cost-of-production. The project was one of the many hands-on activities that Dabeet uses in class to let students discover economic concepts on their own.
MCC student Samantha Shriver felt the exercise was a fun way to learn about how a business works in terms of productivity and competition. “It allowed us to work as a team to come up with the best strategy, and it let us have fun and laugh while we were learning what it means to run a business,” she said.
Classmate Catherine Lawrence also thought the activity was beneficial. “Being in an actual business scenario, it’s easy to forget a few core concepts. This activity reminded me of these concepts,” she said.
Dabeet, who is MCC’s Business Department Chair and an economics/statistics instructor, said he’s been “working for years to make economics a fun subject for my students.”
Instead of lecturing, Dabeet feels his job as a college instructor is to coach students while they learn the material through experience. He prefers to use activities he either finds or designs himself to let students work out their own lessons.
“Real life application is very important in my classes,” Dabeet said. “I want them to see everything we do, and how we can use the concepts in real life.”