Let’s Play: Human Capital

Concepts: Human Capital

Activity type: Game

Businesses run on capital. Students can often easily understand that. If I have better equipment, I can make a better product. They often ignore, however, that better employees do the same (and are arguably more important.) In this game students play as a recent high school graduate looking to get a job. They will “interview” for a position using only those skills possessed by their character. They can earn more human capital skills by completing fun challenges to help show that human capital isn’t static.

They will then fill out a character sheet based on their own human capital and try again to interview for a job. The hope is that they will realize either a) they are in a good position or b) have some work to do!

Pre-show

Lesson Description: You’re out of high school and it’s time to find a job. Play a game to determine if you have the human capital necessary to land the position of your dreams!

Materials:

-Let’s Play: Human Capital Hyperdoc

-Getting to Know You(r Human Capital) Questions

-Getting to Know Scoring Guide

-Human Capital Skills Reference Sheet (optional)

-Let’s Play: Human Capital Game Cards (Printable)

-Let’s Play: Human Capital Skill Challenges Sheet

-Legos or other building materials (optional for one of the skill challenges)

Set Up:

-Print sets of the Human Capital Game Cards for each group in your class. (5-6 decks)

-Print or provide digital copies of the Getting to Know Your(r Human Capital) Questions sheet for each student.

-Provide a digital copy of the Human Capital Hyperdoc to each student.

-Print or provide a digital copy of the Human Capital Skill Challenges Sheet for each group. (5-6 total) (Already linked in the Hyperdoc.)

-Provide a digital copy of the Getting to Know Scoring Guide to each student. (Already linked in the Hyperdoc - do not hand out until near the end of the lesson.)

-Arrange the classroom into groups of 5-6 students.

-Put a pile of Legos or other building blocks in an accessible location in the classroom.

Welcome Work: 

  1. Students complete the Human Capital Survey sheet. Do not explain the purpose of the sheet or discuss student responses. Encourage them to be honest with their answers.

Show

Instruction:

  1. Use the Hyperdoc to guide you and the students through the remainder of the lesson.
  2. Begin by having students consider the difference between productive equipment and obsolete/ineffective equipment. (Slide 1)
  3. Read in the introduction information on slide 2.
  4. Show a movie clip of a team where each member’s contributions/skills are discussed. Plenty of movies have such scenes. Here’s a sample from The Italian Job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVcteiTOqZo (Slide 4)
  5. Review the background information about human capital on slide 5.
  6. Review the rules of the games on slides 6 and 7. You may want to just go over phase 1 for now and then phase 2 after the groups have played phase 1.
  7. Divide students into groups of 5-6. Give each group a deck of Human Capital game cards. Each group chooses one leader (or you do) to be known as “the entrepreneur.”
  8. The entrepreneur introduces the jobs they will be hiring for during phase 2. (Slide 9)
  9. Each other player selects a character. (Slides 10-22)
  10. Play phase 1 of the game. (Step by step game instructions are included on slide 7)
  11. After completing phase 1, groups play phase 2. You may want to review the rules for phase 2 as a class beforehand. (Slide 8)
  12. After completing phase 2, students answer the debrief questions on slide 23. Discuss the debrief questions as a class.
  13. Students fill out a Human Capital Character Sheet for themselves. (Slide 28) Do not over-explain the process. They are simply to write their own background story and rate themselves on the 15 categories on the sheet.  

Post-Show

  1. Ask which of the in game characters their score most closely resembles. Are they satisfied with that match? Why or why not?
  2. Review the scores for each question on the Human Capital Survey Scoring Sheet. The scores on the sheet correlate to the human capital scores for the game characters. Students should compare the scores from the scoring sheet to the scores they gave themselves in their personal Human Capital Character Sheet they completed in step X above.
  3. Ask if their scores for each category were generally higher or lower than the ones indicated on the survey scoring sheet.
  4. Ask, “Why do you think you over/underestimated your human capital values? What does that say about your current level of human capital?”