Absolute and Comparative Advantage Activity: A replayable review exercise

Take advantage of this collaborative activity to help your students practice content including:

-calculating absolute and comparative advantage

-theory related to production possibilities curves such as straight vs. curved lines and points on, in, and outside the PPC

-identifying mutually-beneficial terms of trade

To start each of five activity slides, students will construct PPCs for two countries using dice rolls. In turns, students come to the board to check the work of the previous student before adding one new answer to each slide. Questions on each slide slowly ramp up in difficulty, starting from PPC shape and opportunity cost, progressing into PPC shifts and advantage calculations, and finally reaching terms of trade and consuming outside the PPC.

This scaffolded exercise is a great tool to prepare students for an assessment on these basic economic concepts. Because students' dice rolls determine the details of the questions, this activity offers high replay ability to allow many extra practice rounds.