Bringing Econ to Life

Bringing Econ to Life

A colleague and I had long been speaking about the ways in which we could engage economics students more with the world around them. That is of course how The Curious Economist first came to being – me wanting to provide tailored economics news stories to my students, written in a simpler and more informal way than traditional news outlets.

Anyway, back to me and my colleague. One of the ideas we came up with was an economics top trumps game where each card would be a real-world example of an economic policy in action. This resource if we could pull it off we said, would be absolutely perfect for our IB students who need to be able to explain and evaluate actual examples of economic policy in their Paper 1 15-mark essay.

We began brainstorming and came up with the general idea and mechanics of the gameplay. What we needed to do next was come up with 48 interesting and academically stimulating real-world examples of economic policy in action. Now this might be where you think ChatGPT came in but you would be wrong. This was actually a job for our genius Oxford educated colleague whose photographic like memory allows him to remember every economist article he ever read. Not only did he come up with the examples, he also helped to rate them according to the 5 categories in which the “trumping” would take place. As I said – genius.

Now this is where ChatGPT and another AI friend Midjourney come in. And not to forget Canva either, which as I have mentioned before is one of my favourite tech tools out there.

We then used ChatGPT to help us summarise each policy into around 100 words according to a rigid structure which we had trained it on with an example written by us. There was a bit of back and forth to get the tone and level of depth right but once that was found, we banged out all 48 summaries in no time. These would go on the front of each card along with the ratings.

Whilst I was taking care of this, my colleague was in charge of image generation. He used both Dalle in ChatGPT and Midjourney to create stunning imagery which would both represent the policy and engage our students. Whilst this part was time consuming to get the perfect picture for each card, the result was astonishing (as you can see in some of the examples above).

The final step was to take the images and content for each card and use Canva to create a beautiful final product. Once again, this is where Canva shines bright! Gone are the days spending hours on photoshop, carefully drawing lines around a part of your image to remove the background or make a dodgy looking bystander disappear. Gone I say! Introducing background remover and magic eraser at the touch of a button – unbelievable! And these functions are just a drop in the ocean of all that Canva has to offer. The truth is that now anyone can be an averagely good graphic designer, and better than average if you play around for long enough!

After messing around with colours and designs we finally decided on the look and made the cards. The result – amazing. Not only extremely professional in appearance but also incredibly useful and academically accurate and engaging. Living in China, it has also been easy to get them professionally made after I found a factory who could print them for around $3 a pack. We now have a pack in each classroom and students have even bought them too at cost price.

Now that is what I call enhancing learning with AI. What we started with was an idea, an idea that would probably have taken around 200 hours to produce something of the quality which we have. Too many hours in my opinion, and hence nothing would have gotten done. However, with our ideas plus the help of AI, we were able to make something of the highest quality and academic rigour in around 40 hours of work. Still a lot you might say, but low enough to incentivise action on an awesome project rather than deter.