A smartphone fully disassembled with every component laid out beside the raw ore specimens its materials came from
Year 7 · Unit 02 · Lesson 01

The Phone Teardown

One idea must land: demand runs the chain backwards — what you want decides what gets made, which decides what gets mined.

Unit 2 opens with an autopsy. One phone, fully torn down, every component beside the ore it began as — and students become market analysts who discover that the most powerful force in mining isn’t the excavator. It’s them. A real class survey turns their own preferences into market data, and the data points straight at the ground.

Spark

The autopsy

Project the teardown large. Say: “This phone died so you could learn its secrets.” Every student locks a number — how many mined materials in one phone? — before the reveal: 40-plus minerals and metals (the same number their very first Ground Up lesson used; watch who remembers).

Land the unit question: “How does something buried underground end up in your pocket? Five lessons from now, you’ll own the whole answer.”
Core

The forensic tour

Walk the components while students fill the forensic table: battery → lithium (Greenbushes) and nickel (Goldfields); casing → aluminium from Darling Range bauxite; circuit board → Kalgoorlie gold and copper; screen → silica sand; chip → silicon. “Various” is the honest answer where WA isn’t definitive — model that honesty.

The Unit 1 callback does the emotional work: they MAPPED these regions three weeks ago. Now the regions are in their pocket. “Your phone is Western Australia, folded up small.”
Workshop

The market speaks

One vote each: what matters most in your next phone? Six options, collected by hands, sticky dots, or a live Forms poll if devices are out. Teams tally the class data, chart it as bars, then interpret like analysts: if this class were the world market, what gets mined more next year? Less? Deliverable: a one-line mining forecast written like an investor headline — plus an honesty check on their sample size.

The punchline is real: when the world chose electric cars and bigger batteries, lithium demand surged and Greenbushes became one of Earth’s most important lithium sources. Consumer taste reached 300 metres underground.
Land it

Exit ticket + the chain seed

Memory check (part → material → region), the descriptor in their own voice (how could YOUR next phone change what gets mined in WA?), and the seed for Lesson 2: list every step you think happened between the rock and your pocket. Keep these — next lesson opens by testing their guessed chains against the real one.

Teacher intel

Who decided lithium mattered — the miner, or you?
If everyone kept their phone five years instead of two, what changes at the mine gate?
What would make gold worthless? What would make it priceless?
Your survey has 30 people; the real market has billions. What does that do to your forecast’s confidence?
Watch for“Phones are metal and plastic” (40-plus specific minerals) · “miners decide what to dig” (demand decides; miners respond) · “WA = iron ore only” (the battery boom rewrote that).
Running shortDrop the two-year-phone discussion and harvest fewer forecasts. Protect the survey, the interpretation, and the exit ticket’s Lesson 2 seed.
SupportForensic table with the materials column pre-filled — students match regions only. The survey vote needs no scaffold; that’s its beauty.
ExtendThe substitution question: if lithium doubled in price, what would phone-makers do? Substitute chemistries, recycle, redesign — the market answers back.