Abstract:

During more than 50 years the author have been trying to elaborate, to test, and to disseminate the pedagogical instruments for better understanding different types of economic activity. Some of these instruments were innovative in the time of their development. The others presented the modification of existing instruments, or the transfer methods and technologies from various scientific fields and adaptation to the economy and management. The author described these pedagogical instruments and results of their implementation in the row of publication in Russian. The searches with the help of Web of Science, Scopus, EconLit and the other electronic resources have shown that some of our instruments may be useful for the teachers outside Russian Federation. Therefore, I have chosen five the most effective instruments for understanding economic activity, and decided to present their brief description in English in the annotated report. It is necessary to underline that all presented instruments contain mental, manual, and electronic (MS Excel) variants. It is possible to use them for self-learning, for teaching schoolchildren (12 years and more) and university students (all levels and almost all specialties). As well as we do not exclude persons in business schools.

1. Training simulator “Inventory and currency capital circulation”. The problems concerning the proper inventories and currency capital management were, are, and will be very important for the most firms. The grave disadvantage of the existing teaching materials consists of the attempt to embrace at once all types of inventories. In our training simulator we consider the most simple construction at the very beginning, and then gradually to add new factors and links in order to approximate the reality. The understanding the relationship between natural and monetary flows at every stage of the study is very important.

2. Simulation game “Magic circle”. In the real economy, the firms pay money for input materials, receive the materials from suppliers, input these materials into production process, output the finished goods, sale goods to their customers, receive money, and again use money in order to purchase the materials. The coordination problem arises when the firm uses two or more materials and has two or more customers. The game “Magic circle” shows how the firms are able to manage inventories in optimal manner as for their firms as for the system of linked firms. In the opposite way, it is possible to demonstrate the sad results of the wrong solutions.

3. Training simulator “Create your firm and start to work”. This simulator unites technical, technological, economic, and financial aspects. The user may choose the ready simple enterprise (firm) from the bank of examples, or may construct his/hers own firm.

4. Training simulator “Calculation and analysis corporation (firm) strategies”. There are a few stages in this simulator. At the very beginning, the user traces the calculations from the rate of sales up to profit and its distribution for investments and dividends. Then the user goes inversely. The starting example includes simple and round numbers (1, 2, 100, and similar) in order to trace the calculation mentally. The next stages permit the software application. The simulator helps to see many positive and negative factors of development (for instance bankruptcy). At the end, it is possible to use the data of real corporations (firms).

Keywords:

Pedagogical, economic, education, effective, method.