A Practical Lesson on Production for Business Students, Intro to Business and What Businesses Do

What Businesses Do: A Practical Lesson in Production - The document consists of 8 pages and includes an ‘Instruction and Guidelines’ sheet and a ‘Discussion’ sheet for teachers, with key points to raise and questions to pose to students, together with the following sheets for students: a ‘Briefing’ sheet, a ‘Design’ sheet, a ‘Resource Costs, Selling Price and Results’ sheet and a ‘Cube Pattern’ sheet.

What Businesses Do: A Practical Lesson in Production

Aims:
To stimulate interest in the topic.
To establish prior knowledge in the topic.
To introduce key terms relevant to the topic.

APT’s ‘Practical Lessons for Business Students’ are not meant to be prescriptive. They are intended to be an enjoyable way to introduce Business topics. Some brief guidance is provided as to the sort of responses expected to the activities set.

Key terms and concepts introduced:
Inputs, outputs and the transformation of resources into finished products.
Adding value, value added, costs, price, total revenue.
Stakeholders.
Opportunity cost.

Activities Overview:
This activity requires students to interact with each other and makes them aware of the basic reason why businesses exist, ie to satisfy a need or want. The activity requires students to undertake the process of adding value by creating a simple product out of basic materials, using simple equipment and their own skills. Students are required to make decisions over the product they produce, taking into account the resources required, costs involved, and likely selling price. The activity provides scope to refer to the concept of opportunity cost as well as to introduce the various stakeholders involved in business activity.

The activity itself will take about 60 minutes. It can then be referred to throughout the teaching of Business courses at various points using the information contained in the ‘Discussion Points’ section below. It is worth spending time on. Not only is it a good ‘ice breaker’ to use early on in a course with a relatively new group of students, it touches upon many business concepts, and so should prove to be a highly useful reference point at various stages. For example, it highlights the importance of quality control, training, and organisational structure in helping to maximise productivity and, ultimately, profit. There is also plenty of scope to make the activity more complex by adding a few figures here and there, to enable students to calculate break-even point and profit.

The purchase of this resource comes with a licence to make the resource available in digital and / or in print form (including photocopying) to staff and up to 60 students attending the purchasing institution (ie the individual school / college on a single site) in any given year.