Summer session courses mean extended meeting times. George Lucas may be able keep people's attention for one three-hour stint, but as an economics professor, you face an uphill struggle to engage students on a daily basis. Nonetheless, summer courses must cover the same terrain as their semester or quarter counterparts.

Experiments allow students to participate in a memorable active-learning experience. Having played an instrumental role in the experiments, students are eager to explain the results using economic tools. Online experiments offer you and your students a welcome change of pace from the marathon of lecture and discussion, without sacrificing course progress.

Online experiments offer you a couple of additional benefits: (1) they ensure every student gets to play a role rather than watching passively from the sidelines, and (2) they free you from recording information and organizing participants, allowing your students to run multiple rounds with instant results.

Anyone can successfully incorporate online experiments into his or her summer courses. If your classroom is not Internet-ready, use a short trek to a campus computer lab as a class break or run an experiment outside of the class period. Be sure to assign our corresponding problem sets, which prepare students for the experiment and then help them interpret the results once the experiment is over.

Even with a charismatic professor, the combination of hot days and long class periods are the alchemy of boredom. Try an experiment in your classes this summer and see how the interactivity can liven things up!