Diseconomies of Scale - doing the Dog and Bone exercise.

Last year I read and enjoyed Jonny Clark's Dog and Bone blog post on tutor2u and filed it away for when it was time for diseconomies of scale. I liked it even better when he did a follow up post on how the activity actually worked in his class and this is something that I think we should be doing more of - sharing how ideas have actually worked (or otherwise) in the classroom.

In any case, I have just covered diseconomies of scale with my class and thought that I would share how I did a minor adaption of Jonny's idea and how it worked. I always like having a competitive element in class activities so split my 18 students into three groups of six. Each person had a mini whiteboard and I showed the first person in each team the original dog and bone picture, giving them ten seconds to look at it.

They then had twenty seconds to draw it before showing the next person for ten seconds and so on. I just had to emphasise that those who hadn't seen it yet had to keep their eyes averted or better yet closed. Once they had drawn theirs and shown the next person they flipped their whiteboard over so it couldn't be seen until the end. Once the pictures had made their way to the front I was able to show each of the final pictures to the class.

The results of the three teams are shown below.

I chose the picture that still had the bone drawn as the winner, and we then talked about the issues (much like the points made in Jonny's original blog). The lollipops given to the winning six also provided a chance to talk about rewards and motivation!

The students thoroughly enjoyed it (amid much investigation and recriminations into where the drawing went so wrong) and I hope it will mean they are able to deepen their understanding of diseconomies of scale as well!