Hi, I’m Isabel, and today I’ll be sharing the activity the Chips of Trade. The Chips of Trade is a middle school level activity in which students, acting as countries, discuss how resources are inequitably distributed throughout the world, and how this imbalance motivates trade. This lesson has strong ties to economics, social studies, and geography.
With this lesson, your students will gain an understanding of how resources are inequitably distributed throughout the world, make connections between growing human populations and its effects on resource distributions, and provide examples of imports and exports, and understand why trade occurs.
For this simulation, you will need poker chips, specifically twice as many chips as you have participating students, and as close as you can get to an equal number of three different colored chips.
Part 1: Let the Chips Fall
When done in your class, you can incorporate all of your students, but today I have eight of my colleagues here to help me demonstrate. Because I have eight participants, there are 16 poker chips out. You’ll give your students a signal, and on your signal, instruct your students to grab for the chips. They can only grab up to three chips, no more than three chips.
I’ll demonstrate now with my colleagues. Three, two, one, go. Now that students have their chips, you’re going to separate the class into four groups based on the number of chips that each student has.
- In the first group, students with three chips. These students represent countries with a rich resource base.
- In the second group, students with two chips, and these represent countries with a more limited resource base.
- In the third group, you’ve got students with one chip, and these countries have a very limited resource base.
- In the last group, you’ll have students with no chips, and these students represent countries that have virtually no natural resources to adequately support a human population.
Now that your students are separated into the four groups, you can facilitate a discussion.
We offer several discussion questions. For example, what would it be like to live in a country within each group? Which country could benefit from importing or exporting?
Part 2: What’s a Country Worth?
In part two of this lesson plan, we provide four countries as examples.
- Canada is an example of a country that falls into a group with three chips.
- Colombia is an example of a country that falls into the group with two chips.
- Nepal is an example of a country that falls into a group with one chip.
- And Burundi is an example of a country that falls into a group with no chips.
We provide a chart that lists statistics, such as population growth, the main imports and exports, and the total worth of these imports and exports per country. This chart can be used to further facilitate discussion about how a country’s resource base influences its ability to trade and provide for its citizens’ health and well-being. One way to wrap up discussion around this activity is to direct your students’ attention to each country’s growth rate and how that statistic contributes to the consumption and availability of a country’s existing resources.
For an upper elementary level activity that is similar to this one, we have the activity When the Chips are Down, which also looks at imports and exports while bringing in the concept of scarcity. This has been the Chips of Trade. For this and other lessons, please visit us at www.populationeducation.org.