Amazon and the Industrial Revolution

A Prime teaching tool!

During the holidays, I recalled just how easy Amazon.com has made our lives, so I tapped into the sales monster for my next class project.

For the Industrial Revolution, I had students choose an inventor and use Amazon to sell their invention. They were to create a fake amazon page to build a fake business and sell a real historical product! Students presented their mock-pages when we began our study of Industrial Revolution economists: Smith, Ricardo, Blanc, and Marx. It worked perfectly. Students presented the inventions--the machinery that changed economics forever--and we discussed the socio-economic changes that resulted in the life-work of economists like Smith and Marx.

I assessed students on the accuracy of their product information. The Amazon format functioned well for this. My students leveraged categories like “‘features,” “dimensions” and “Frequently Asked Questions” to creatively display information about their inventor and his invention. I also evaluated them based on their understanding of the Revolution as a whole. Students were encouraged to show how these inventions changed society. Again, they used Amazon features like “Frequently Bought Together” to fit the invention into the larger context of the Industrial Revolution and a changing society.

Finally, I had them comment on one of their classmates’ projects to make further connections between the inventors/inventions. Students were supposed to give the product 1-5 stars based on its efficacy which could be evaluated based on legitimate, historical problems with the invention, or based on knowledge of a similar product elsewhere that may have been more or less effective. Below is a sample project and a sample comment.

This student covered Robert Fulton’s steam engine in Pages:

Here’s a comment on Elias Howe’s sewing machine of 1846. It’s quite harsh!

It was amazing how many different ways students chose to complete this project from the platforms they used to the sections of the Amazon pages that they manipulated. Some used pages (example above), word, powerpoint, and even photoshop (see below). The assignment required research, critical thinking and creativity. All in all, I felt my students did a great job using the Amazon platform to portray information. It also led us into an engaging few classes on Industrial Revolution economics. We reflected on how the Revolution’s changes relate to today, and speculated that services like Amazon may one day be referred to during a lesson on the “Internet Revolution.”

And I'll leave you with one more example: