KOCHI: At a time when Western countries are adopting new and innovative teaching techniques like e-learning and learning-through-games, the Department of Economics of Maharaja’s College are also not too behind in experimenting with novel ideas. The Economics department from the past one year has been using cartoons to teach economics. The subject involves plenty of mathematical and statistical data that can confuse the student or make it tedious for him/her.To make these advanced level problems more interesting to understand and solve, Maharaja’s, in association with five cartoonists from the Cartoon Academy and 15 professors from the college had organised a workshop for the students last year. As a follow-up to that event, all the cartoons have been compiled into a book called ‘Econotools’ which will be published by January 2012. The book contains 55 cartoons and illustrations. “The cartoonists were taught economic theories through an interaction with the teachers, after which they made 10 to 15 cartoons on various theories,” says S Muraleedharan, research supervisor and the brain behind the idea. Cartoons have immense opportunity as teaching and learning aids in economics but unfortunately they have not penetrated beyond the realm of politics and society, adds Muraleedharan. The Department has also made a 15 minute short film where three theories- diminishing marginal utility, equi marginal utility and market utility have been explained. To illustrate partial and general equilibrium, the old Nazir and Sheela song has been compared with the new Prithviraj songs. “Partial equilibrium is the situation when there is a disturbance in one particular market which we can see in Nazir song where the actor is the only person moving and other background scenes are static. When this is applied in theory, Nazir and Sheela become the disturbed market and background becomes the other markets which is stable,” says Muraleedharan. Another interesting economics term that has been explained is ‘Externality’ which means a party or a group benefiting from an external factor without spending anything from their own pockets. “Two gardens in two adjacent houses are shown. In one man’s garden, there is a honeycomb and looking at it mischievously is his neighbour who obviously desires the honey. Thereby the neighbour is benefited without taking any risk of his own,” he says. This makes an otherwise dry-appearing subject like Economics instantly relatable and interesting to the students. More than 250 students participated in the workshop last year and since then have been looking forward to this innovative learning technique “The workshop was of great help to us. Theory of demand, production function, perfect markets, competition and monopoly, Ricardo’s theory of rent and capital market, information asymmetry and health economics is just a child’s play now,” says Sruthi A, economics student.
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