The supply chain laid out as objects: exploration map and ore, excavator, processing plant, ship, and finished device
Year 7 · Unit 02 · Lesson 02

The Chain

One idea must land: price isn't a sticker — it's a decision, made at every link, and remade every time demand moves.

Last lesson ended with a guess — every step from the rock to the pocket. Today the guesses get marked, and then students don’t study the chain, they become it: five stages, five links, a price decision at every hand-off, and two news flashes that force the whole chain to reprice in real time.

Spark

Test your guess

Hand back the Lesson 1 exit tickets and project this lesson’s hero — the chain laid out as objects. Students score their guessed chains against the real five: Exploration · Extraction · Processing · Shipping · Manufacture. Hands up: who scored five? Who missed a whole stage?

Processing and Shipping vanish from most guesses — the invisible middle is the point. Someone’s whole career lives in the stage they didn’t know existed.
Core

Five stages, five pay packets

Deal the stage cards — each carries its costs and a real job spotlight, exploration geologist to manufacturing engineer, read aloud around the room. Then the pricing rule, taught once and plainly: cover your costs, pay your people, keep a margin. Price = costs + margin. That’s the whole engine.

Don’t over-teach it — the workshop makes them live it, which teaches it better than you can.
Workshop

The Value Run + the news flashes

Teams of five, one stage each. Stage 1 prices and sells to Stage 2, and the ladder fills as a $25 rock climbs toward a $300 product. Then the teacher reads Flash 1 — EV sales double, demand surges — and every stage repositions: up, down, hold, defended in a line. Then Flash 2: a new chemistry halves demand. Reprice again.

The debrief question that lands the economics: which stage felt the shocks hardest? The mine gate — the chain’s shock absorber. Keep it qualitative; the insight is enough.
Land it

Exit ticket + the opportunity-cost seed

Five stages from memory; the descriptor in their own words (how does a business set its price — and what makes it change?); and the Lesson 3 seed: one budget, three things screaming for it, fund one. That seed IS opportunity cost — don’t name it yet. Next lesson does.

Teacher intel

Why can’t you just charge whatever you like? (The next link can refuse — and consumers can walk.)
When demand doubled, who captured the most new value — and who just paid more?
Which costs can a stage control — and which just arrive from the stage before?
If you ran the whole chain, which stage would you want to own? (Seeds Lesson 5.)
Watch for“Price = what something is worth” (price is a decision, not a property) · “the mine sets the phone’s price” (five decisions stack) · “demand up = everyone wins” (ask who pays the higher inputs).
Running shortOne news flash instead of two — keep Flash 1, the friendlier maths. Protect the guess-test, one full ladder, and the exit ticket’s seed.
SupportFix every margin at 25% and hand that team the worked column from the run sheet — they focus on the flow, not the arithmetic.
ExtendThe margin war: Manufacture demands 50% while Extraction takes 10%. Who has the power in this chain — and why?