Online Graphing Activity for Principles of Economics Courses

This paper describes how an online drawing program and bulletin board are used to create active learning activities for a principles of economics class. In the activity the student downloads an initial diagram that sets up a textbook principles scenario. The student uses an image-editing program to complete the diagram, so that it represents the outcome predicted in the textbook and posts it to a bulletin board. The tools for the activity: SumoPaint.com, and WikiSpaces.com; are free and available on the Internet. By appropriately adjusting the information included in the initial diagram, there is flexibility to adjust the difficulty level, for high school AP courses or college level courses, and to adapt the exercise to a range of different classroom formats and varied physical locations of the student.