Economics of Castle Design

Our group project used economic laws and concepts to make a medieval castle out of foam board, paper, and glue. We all had a budget, and we had to purchase each part of the castle so that it was best defended while staying on budget. One of these castle defenses for purchase was a murder hole. A murder hole is a place in the castle in which an intruder is trapped. Through the murder hole you can dump stones, hot oils, or anything down it onto the intruder. Our main goal was to use economic laws in our castle design. We had to purchase walls, towers, crenelations, and defenses all for budget of $45,500.

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The requirements to the Castle Project were to use the economic laws that we learned about to buy the castle defenses for our medieval castle. One of these economic laws were supply and demand. When the supply of a company is high, the demand could be high or could be low. When the demand is low and the supply is high, the company will lower the price so that the demand will go up. Basically, supply and demand is always trying to equal, because you will never lose money and will always have enough supply when they both equal out. We used these concepts in the making of our castle by our teacher raising and lowering prices on parts based on his supply and demand.

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My main challenge that I encountered was collaborating with the other students in my group. Since I didn’t know how to collaborate at this level during a project, I had to grow my collaborating abilities. Collaboration in this instance was working with Alex, J’La, and Jenn on our Castle project and making decisions on the castle design using the economic laws. Though this growth was very difficult I kept trying to move forward. An example of the difficulty is when we were choosing how the structure of our castle would be and finding the compromise of what we want with what money we had. We also had to collaborate on opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the act of considering what we had and if we bought an item, we may not be able to buy another. We had to compromise on what we needed, what we wanted, and consider the opportunity cost of each item we bought.

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I believe that opportunity cost will impact my later life and even my life now. Everybody uses opportunity cost when they buy an item. I use opportunity cost when I shop. I think in my head “If I buy this dress, will I have enough to buy these shoes?” I consider what the impact will be of the purchase.

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This artifact shows our finished castle including the black murder holes and crenelations. The castle between us is proof of collaboration - making the decisions of the castle design to get the final product shown. Since collaboration is working together and learning how to make decisions and agree together we definitely grew in collaboration. I know this because we did work together and make these decisions in our project when we chose what we would buy and how much it would cost.

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I also grew in persistence and became more experienced in this quality through the time of this project. Persistence to me in this time was to keep pushing forward in our project even when we started to go over budget. This was a hard time for me and made me want to give up on finishing the project because it made me feel unsuccessful and ashamed. I learned in this process that I had accept the mistakes that I made and to learn from them. This is important lesson to learn and even in the process you feel bad for failing it also makes you stronger. If we didn’t have struggles in our life we would just stay the same because we would not be challenged. After my teacher reminded me that it is not “real money” and that being in debt in real life feels much worse. I am glad I learned that life lesson now instead the hard way in real life later.

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This budget sheet above contains my struggle or I like to say challenge because I excelled due to the challenge. Our budget sheet contains what we bought. An example of what we bought was murder holes (as explained above). Also in the bottom right corner shows our final spending cost and what our budget was. We had a hard time accepting this part but, we absolutely learned from going over budget and how to act in a situation in the future. I can use this instance in the future because, it shows me were we went wrong and in real life I have learned not to spend more then I have.

 

I really learned from this part of the project because I know that I became more persistent. I know that I became more persistent because I pursued even when I felt “knocked down” and I learned from my experience of going over budget. Now I know how to act in group projects better now than I did before this project and this really impacts me as a student at STEM, and in my future career.