Social Studies

Marketing and Advertising Students who have the Community feature option enabled can run their own shops, filled with their creations (see above). Many want their shops to be featured as a “top shop” which requires a large number of other members to become their customers. Applied MathSetting prices Determining prices is a practical application of mathematics. Setting a price too high will make it unlikely for a product to be sold. Setting it too low, on the other hand, means forgoing profits! Members set prices for each item in their stores. The prices determine the profit that they will make with each sale, as there is also a production cost involved in each sale. In addition, through the “My Business” game, members can run sales promotions (reducing the price, but being promoted in return) as another way to adjust prices. Similarly, authors of newspaper articles can set an asking price for advertisement placement on their articles. Other members can then decide based on the quality of the article and the asking price if they want to place the article there.

Reducing cost When selling an item, members receive the difference between the price they have set and the “production cost,” i.e., the price of a blank template of the same item. Through the My Business game, they can choose to purchase different levels of machinery to reduce production cost. This, of course, only makes sense if they are selling enough items to justify the cost of the machine. The sales trend for each item can be monitored in the My Business game and children can apply math according to their abilities to evaluate for which items they want to buy a cost-reducing machine.