Year 8 are studying why the factory out-produced the home workshop, and what that did to work. For a twenty-minute shift the class makes eight-page booklets from A4 sheets: half the tables as craft workers who each fold, staple, trim, number and rule every booklet themselves, the rest as lines of five in which each student does one step and passes the work on. Everyone is at a station, so nobody is free to observe. A school tablet on a tall stand looks down on one craft table and one line, framed to show hands, work and a countdown timer but no faces, and records in time-lapse; waiting booklets lie in a row beside each station so they can be counted from above. The teacher plays the shift back in under a minute, then again, pausing at every two-minute mark while students record the queue at each station and the number of idle hands. They plot the queue at the slowest station, hear Adam Smith's 1776 account of ten men making upwards of 48,000 pins a day, and write what the line gained and what its workers lost. The footage is deleted after the lesson.
Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
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