Young-il Toy Convention

I have been working for weeks on this lesson plan, and finally put it into the implementation stage today. The idea: an information gap activity taking place at a toy convention where manufacturers' reps are pushing their product on store buyers. The buyers have to find out about safety-testing, incentive programs, recommended ages, etc, and the ones manning the product booths have to find out about the store's price point, customer base, etc. I thought it would be more interesting for high school boys than a pretend supermarket.

I created eight booths, for eight products, along with company names and logos, product flyers and the like. It was a lot of work. Here is the booth set up:


Inexpensive, quality toys with no batteries required are tough to find here, but I managed to get eight items that I could live with, including a magnetic tangram board, a Rubik's cube in a coin bank, a doctor kit, and some plastic animal playsets in little suitcases. If I could have found some marbles, I'd have nine!

The co-teacher picks eight mature students with good English skills to man the booths; the others are given a worksheet with a unique identity, a store and a set of requirements (age range, price, etc) they are trying to fulfill. Of course, everyone has a match, if they can find it.

It's easy to catch a cheater (and there are cheaters, since they believe filling in the sheet is more important than practising English), because if "Sam Spade" interviewed at "Scientific Fun" his info will be on the manufacturer's rep. worksheet.




It went okay, but the real test is tomorrow, fifth period. There's a handful of unmotivated smart-alecks, but they often ruin it for everyone. And my co-teacher is the most inexperienced of the bunch. Stay tuned.