01 / BACKGROUND
Learning Goals
When I began teaching economics, I had broad state standards and no existing curriculum. Much of the material I found focused on jobs, money, or the differences between capitalism and communism. Those topics matter, but I wanted students to understand the questions underneath them. What do people need? What do they value? Who gets to decide how resources are used? And what happens when people’s needs and priorities conflict?
I developed the Economic Alignment Map to work through those questions. It compares capitalism, command economies, and mutualism as three broad archetypes. Actual economies combine elements of different systems. The map helped me think about how communities organize decisions, respond to scarcity, and balance individual interests with responsibilities to others. It also made tradeoffs easier to see. An arrangement that works well for one purpose, or one group of people, may create problems elsewhere or consequences that emerge years later.
I wanted students to recognize that economic systems aren’t simply facts of nature. They’re shaped by what people value, the constraints they face, and the decisions they make together. Once established, those systems influence people’s behavior and expectations in return. They can also be changed, although changing them involves tradeoffs of its own.
02 / PURPOSE
Why I Wrote a Story
I wanted students to encounter economic systems through events and decisions, rather than just read descriptions of how they worked. A rule about protecting a medicinal plant might seem reasonable until someone needs that plant to save a family member. Suddenly, questions about scarcity, responsibility, and competing needs become much harder. I wanted students to see the logic of different systems, but also to understand what it might feel like to live within them.
Around that time, I noticed a student reading The Hunger Games during one of my presentations. The student was clearly capable of sustained attention when the material was compelling. I started thinking about whether I could bring some of that engagement into economics.
I wrote a five-chapter science-fiction adventure about travelers who leave their famine-stricken village in search of help. Each society they encounter operates according to different values and priorities. The travelers aren’t simply observing those systems. They need things from them, run into obstacles, and have to make difficult choices. Their experiences gave us concrete situations through which to explore economic ideas, and characters whose perspectives students could understand even when they disagreed with their decisions.
Read the five-chapter story03 / THE CIVILIZATIONS
The five societies
Umuofia
The travelers come from a farming village where families share responsibility for getting through lean years. When the harvests fail, the village sends them out to look for help.
The Forest
People take their cues from an artificial intelligence woven into the roots, fungi, soil, and water. The Forest protects plants people may need in the future, even when someone needs medicine right away.
Capital City
Citizens earn points that determine where they can live, what they can buy, and what work they can do. There’s plenty to go around if you can earn it. Some of the people who fall behind quietly disappear.
The Common Reach
A shared plan helps make sure everyone has enough. A better irrigation pump could help feed Umuofia, but adopting it would disrupt other parts of the plan.
The Alignment
Artificial intelligence has become the environment itself. The travelers could live free of hunger and pain if they stayed. Once inside, they would have no way to leave.
04 / IN THE CLASSROOM
How we worked through a chapter
We read, answered questions, and worked on maps using paper copies. That helped students keep their attention on the page and the discussion. We used Chromebooks when they were useful, especially for writing.
Reading and discussion
Students took turns reading short sections aloud. I’d stop and ask someone to tell us what had happened in their own words. We talked about the characters’ decisions as they came up. In Chapter 2, Ayo wants to leave a plant until it has gone to seed, and Okonkwo asks, “Next year? My sister may not have next year.”
Comprehension and interpretation
The worksheet helped me see what we needed to go over together. It asked students to recall what the Forest gave the travelers, explain why Okonkwo was angry, and identify a benefit and a cost of Ayo’s decision.
Select any handout to enlarge it.
Analysis with Thinking Maps
Thinking Maps were a regular part of my teaching across my classes throughout the school year. Students already knew how to use them to organize information, compare ideas, and examine cause and effect. That familiarity was useful here. They could concentrate on understanding the economic systems instead of learning a new graphic organizer.
For Chapter 2, students used a Tree Map to organize evidence about the Forest’s environment, values, and decision-making. A Venn diagram helped them compare those characteristics with Umuofia. The maps gave students with different reading abilities a common way to organize their thinking, while leaving room for more sophisticated comparisons. We could then discuss relationships that weren’t necessarily stated outright in the story, including how each society’s values influenced its decisions.
Independent application
For the Chapter 6 assignment, students worked out for themselves what Umuofia could do with what the travelers had learned.
05 / ASSESSMENT
The final assignments
Summative Writing Assignment:
Returning to Umuofia
I left the story’s final chapter unwritten. The travelers return to Umuofia without a simple solution to the village’s problems. What they bring home is experience. They’ve seen how different societies organize their lives, what each system makes possible, and what people sacrifice to preserve what they value.
They’ve also learned that changing a system can be difficult, even when the changes seem beneficial. Now they have to explain what they’ve experienced to their own community and consider which ideas Umuofia might adopt. Some changes could help the village survive, but they could also challenge its traditions and relationships.
I asked sixth- and seventh-grade students to write that final chapter. They had to draw on what the travelers learned in the four societies, imagine how their community might respond, and show the consequences of the choices they made. I wanted students to move beyond comparing economic systems to imagining how people might deliberately change one.
One Technology, Three Societies
Seventh graders completed a second assignment that extended the same reasoning to technology. Interested sixth graders could do it as an extension.
I asked students to imagine a brain-computer interface arriving in three of the societies from the story. The technology would offer similar technical possibilities in each place, but its purpose and use would depend on what people there valued. Technology makes certain actions easier or more attractive, but people also shape technologies through the purposes they choose for them.
Students developed three different responses.
- The Forest. An illustration showing how someone might use the interface in a society organized around its relationship with the living world.
- Capital City. An advertisement promoting the technology in a society driven by competition, achievement, and status.
- The Common Reach. A slide from a presentation explaining how the technology might serve a community organized around collective planning.
The different formats helped students approach the technology from within each society’s perspective. The larger goal was to bring that thinking back to their own world. When we encounter a new technology, its uses aren’t inevitable. What we choose to do with it reflects our values, and those choices can reshape the way we live.