The basic principles of economics provide an incredibly powerful framework for understanding and changing the world. Alas, it is hard to imagine a worse way to try and teach/learn these ideas than by using the standard lecture format and fat books that have become the norm.

Over the last decade, colleagues and I have been developing a wonderful alternative for teaching economics. The approach, based on classroom experiments, actively engages students in experiencing, discovering, and understanding the key ideas underlying economics. Studies indicate that students learn as much or more using such methods, while enjoying the experience far more than usual.

As my colleague Murray Gell-Mann points out, it is remarkable how little education has changed over the last few centuries (five hundred years ago, monks in a scriptorium used to dutifully sit and copy every word that was read to them by a lector from a manuscript...and now...). The web offers some new, and potentially powerful, learning opportunities, and both the EconU and EconX projects are designed to exploit these opportunities while also making quality education available to a much larger audience.

Based on the active learning ideas discussed above, we have developed a fully automated, web-based version of an experiment-based course in economic principles (a link will be posted soon). Students participate over the web in a series of experiments (students need only to have access to a standard web browser, and the experiments can easily be given outside of normal class time). After each experiment, the student completes a customized workbook/textbook that is seamlessly tied to his or her recent experimental experience. The system handles all of the routine class management tasks (including grading the workbooks), allowing the students to devote more time to learning while the instructor devotes more time to teaching.

Scott Page (Michigan) and I have been running the Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science Modeling and Complexity since 1995. The two-week workshop, sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute, takes place each summer usually in July. The workshop brings together a small group of top graduate students from around the world for a series of lectures and a very intensive period of scientific collaboration on projects of their choosing. The workshop creates, if only for a short time, a nice model of what graduate education should be about---pursuing frontier science in a wonderfully collaborative and enjoyable environment.

73/88-110 Experiments with Economic Principles: This course, usually taught each fall at CMU, teaches the key principles of economics through the use of classroom experiments. Students learn about each principle by first participating in an experiment where they attempt to earn profit by, say, trading used cars (hopefully, watching out for lemons!). After each experiment the relevant economic theory is developed and tested against the behavior observed in the class. As mentioned above, this is a great way to learn the principles of economics (and, fortunately, formal student ratings reflect this observation as well).

A group of ex-Navy divers provided my first formal training in teaching when I became a SCUBA instructor in 1978. Those lessons, along with countless others from a fine group of professors throughout my academic career, have always made teaching an enjoyable and productive experience for me and, hopefully, my students.