We are excited the newest addition to our Budgeting Game – Public Transit Mode!
One of the major expenses in the game is owning a car. Car ownership comes with several bills players need to pay (including a Car Insurance and Gasoline bill), plus various events throughout the game itself relating to other expenses involved in owning a car, like oil changes, parking tickets and repairing wear-and-tear.
However, car ownership is not necessarily part of the financial reality every student will face, especially while they are still going to college and only working part-time. This led us to release our new Public Transit Mode!
What Changes in Public Transit Mode?
When a player is in Public Transit Mode, they will no longer be issued a bill for their Car Payment or Car Insurance payments, and in place of their “Gasoline” bill each month, they will need to pay for a monthly Public Transit Pass.
All events in the game pertaining to car ownership are instead replaced with trials and tribulations involving taking the bus or other mode of public transit – buses might be late (making them late for work), stranger spills coffee on their favorite shirt, or even needing to rent a car to visit distant relatives.
Using Public Transit Mode
When setting up your next class session, you will have the option to choose how your students get around town – owning a car, or taking public transit:
This setting can be chosen independently for “Part Time” mode (while the player is a college student with a part-time job) and “Full Time” mode (after the player finishes school and is working at a regular job). This is a class-wide setting (not per-student) in order to make the game experience more consistent – and rankings more competitive – across your class.
Other Public Transit Changes
When you choose “Public Transit Mode” for one of the game modes, the following other changes take affect:
- The default wages drop significantly – from $24/hr in part-time mode down to $17/hr. This reflects the reduced cost of a public transit monthly fare vs gas, car payment, AND car insurance bills – while maintaining the same game difficulty of setting and hitting a savings goal of 10% of earnings each month (and making the wages more realistic is another driver for why we implemented this feature!)
- When choosing your bill amounts, the “Car Payment” and “Car Insurance” bills are removed.
- When choosing your bill amounts, the “Gasoline” bill is replaced with “Public Transit Monthly Pass”, with a default value of $50 in Part-Time mode and $150 in Full Time Mode.
Further Customization
Teachers may also want to set up the game such that the scenario is that the student’s parents may have given the car as a gift, or cover the car insurance payments while the student is in school – but still have their players own a car (with the other advantages and costs involved).
These custom scenarios can also be handled in the Budget Game. Teachers can set the “Car Payment” or “Car Insurance” bills to zero – which prevents them from being issued to students (and allows teachers to then lower the game hourly wages to be more realistic for a part-time worker).
This also applies to other bills in the game too – while Rent, TV/Internet, Groceries, and Cell Phone plan bills are required (as students make choices involving these bills at the start of the game), teachers can turn off any other bill by setting its cost to 0 – giving the flexibility of a simplified game for younger students or having a bigger difference in game difficulty between part-time and full-time mode.
We hope you are as excited as we are to get your class up and running!
-The PFinLab Team