Continuing our conversations about the industrial revolution, today in class we took some time to draw and cut out animal cartoons…perfect fit, I know. In order to illustrate the difference in production before and after the industrial revolution, I asked my students to replicate pictures of cartoon animals first on their own then together in an assembly line.

While working on their own and with group members in an assembly line, students were asked to reproduce as many of these animals as possible in a 15 minute time period. While working in groups, students were given three basic jobs and asked to assign those accordingly to create an effective production line. The idea with this activity was to produce an outcome that would ultimately show the students that the assembly line method was much faster. However, there was a down side…Despite the fact that they were able to crank their production up significantly, there was a drastic decrease in quality of product. The picture above is from my 6th period class and shows how the final product, looks much different than the original template. Which raises the question, is it better to use industrial revolution methods that emphasis quantity over quality?

At the end of the day here are our final production numbers…2nd period produced the least amount of animals with 147, however, they did average 9.18 per person. 4th period produced the most of all the classes with 419 and averaged a whopping 18.21 animals per person. Lastly, 6th period had the second most among classes and produced 240 with an average of 12 animals per person.

So…what’s it all mean? We will look at these numbers in-dept tomorrow and discuss what were the positives and negatives of the assembly line and individual working methods.

Mr. McClung