🔗 Phase 3 - Investigation
🔗 Interactive
⏱ 12 minutes
Task 3 - The Barter Chain Challenge
It's your turn to be a trader! Start with an apple. Trade your way, step by step, until you end up with a bicycle.
Tap a character to see what they want and offer
🎉🚲🎉
You made it to the bicycle!
Reflect on your trading journey
How many trades did it take you to get the bicycle?
0 trades
What would have made this easier? · max 100 characters
Bridge to Phase 4 - Discovery
You just experienced the real problem with bartering. Let's connect that back to why money makes trade faster.
What happens in Task 3
A 12-minute Phase 3 - Investigation activity. Students play a barter-chain game: starting with an apple, they tap through six trading characters, deciding at each step whether a trade is possible, to reach the goal item - a bicycle - while avoiding one decoy character that leads nowhere. This is game-based practice and is not graded; the lesson's one graded quiz is in Task 5.
🎯 Learning objectives
To experience directly why bartering can be slow and difficult, to practise reasoning about what someone else might want (not just what you want), and to connect the barter chain experience back to why money makes trade faster.
♿ SEN Adaptations
- A simplified 4-character version of the board is available (Farmer Filip, Baker Bianca, Cheesemaker Carlo, Shop Owner Sofia only)
- All character cards have audio read-aloud; reflection fields accept voice-to-text
- The hint button activates after one failed attempt instead of two
🖨️ No-Tech Format
- Six printed "trading cards" show what each character wants and offers
- Students physically walk or swap cards to reach the bicycle card
- Teacher tracks each student's number of trades on the whiteboard