8-10 yrs old
Digital Literacy
Math & Economics
Technology
LEARNING ECONOMICS WITH MINECRAFT: PRODUCTIVE RESOURCES
February 14, 2017
Handout 1 – Background Information for Teachers
Handout 2 – Instructions for Building a Home in Minecraft
Visual 1 – Human Resources in Minecraft
Visual 2 – Natural Resources in Minecraft
Visual 3 – Capital Resources in Minecraft
SUBMITTED BY: The Council for Economic Education (CEE). For more free K-12 economic and personal finance lesson plans and resources, visit CEE’s teacher site, EconEdlink.
CONCEPTS
Productive Resources, Capital Resources, Human Resources, Natural Resources
CONTENT STANDARDS
Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics: Standard 1 - Scarcity. Productive resources are limited. Therefore, people cannot have all the goods and services they want; as a result, they must choose some things and give up others.
C3 Framework: D2.Eco.3.3-5 Identify examples of the variety of resources (human, capital, physical capital, and natural resources) that are used to produce goods and services.
Common Core State Standards: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.4.2—Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.
INTRODUCTION
Understanding productive resources, the resources required to produce goods and services that people want, is important to understanding the economic world around us. There are three kinds of productive resources: human, natural, and capital.
Human resources are the strength, education, and skills of people. Natural resources are the gifts of nature that are used to produce goods and services. Water, land, and minerals are examples of natural resources. Capital resources are the goods needed to produce or provide access to other goods and to supply services. Examples include buildings, equipment, tools, machinery, ports and other manufactured and constructed things.
In this lesson, students will learn the definitions of resources and analyze their use in building a home within Minecraft. The Minecraft activity will take up the bulk of the lesson time.
RESOURCES
PROCESS
MINECRAFT ACTIVITY
CONCLUSION
When time is up for building, each team should give a tour of their homes and the class should decide which home they liked best based on the elements in Instruction #2.
ASSESSMENT
Each student should write a reflection on the uses of productive resources in their team project:
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