The Thanksgiving Potluck Problem 🦃
In this activity, cousins Sam and Taylor have four hours the night before Thanksgiving to bake pies and rolls for the family potluck, and students help them choose the best baking plan by applying the concepts of absolute advantage, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage.
What Students Do
Students begin with a table showing how long each cousin needs to bake one pie or one batch of rolls, then they determine who has the absolute advantage in each task, complete a table of opportunity costs to find out who has the comparative advantage, and calculate how many pies and batches of rolls the cousins would produce under three different baking plans before deciding which plan Sam and Taylor should follow and explaining why.
Get the Activity
The student activity and its answer key are both available as Google Docs that you can use as written or customize for your classroom.
