Material Detail

This teaching case adapts Lewis Carroll's public-domain classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as a narrative vehicle for introducing core managerial accounting concepts at the undergraduate level. Across seven chapters, Alice encounters and corrects accounting errors made by Wonderland characters, covering cost behaviour and the high-low method, CVP analysis and contribution margin, relevant costs and sunk costs, flexible budgets and variance analysis, predetermined overhead rates and overhead application, balanced scorecard and KPI design, and capital investment and payback analysis.

Each chapter embeds numerical examples, worked calculations, and summary tables directly into the narrative, with Alice serving as the rational analyst and providing students a worked model to evaluate before addressing study questions. A complete teaching note with model answers, facilitation guidance, common student errors, and flexible deployment options is included.

The case is designed for undergraduate intermediate or advanced managerial accounting courses and may be deployed chapter-by-chapter, as an end-of-module review, or as a take-home examination. The literary framing reduces student anxiety around quantitative material and increases voluntary engagement with numerical content.

Note: Portions of this teaching case were developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence (Claude, Anthropic). All content has been reviewed, curated, and edited by the author, who holds full responsibility for the accuracy and pedagogical integrity of the material.

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