With all the craze in fidget spinning I found it hard to say no. Sure, I put up the sign in my classroom that read "At Your Own Risk" and asked boys to put them away. I also read articles from many perspectives about these "toys". Should we encourage the madness, discourage the craze, be more sensitive to those who need these to stay focussed, ban them from our classrooms?
I didn't know the answer. What I did know is that I had 20 or so 6th graders saying, "We need custom spinners for our Kiva Project". We set up a circle graph of which the different companies, who were now fully paid back, could buy into this new concept/idea if they had enough money to do so. They contacted a company to see if "backordered til late May" really meant that or could we get our hands on a few. Then we looked into buying options, coupon codes and applied our new knowledge about algebraic equations to figure out what we could afford 100? 150? 200? More?
With a $50 coupon, if you spent $500 the boys would get a $50 off coupon. So, we set up their algebraic equation for the $2.45 unit price spinners with a $50 set up fee. $2.45x + 50 = 500. Soon we were talking about purchasing 185 spinners for the same cost as 171. The unit price went down from $2.54 all inclusive from $2.74 too.
And it happened... 6 out of 8 groups pooled together $470 to buy 185 fidget spinners with the hopes of doubling their money. We waited, and stressed, will they arrive? And guess what? They did!!! And, even the Assistant Head of School was purchasing them!! And we did double our money:)
