PersonalFinanceLab’s lesson library and assignments is an awesome way to add extra supplements to your class – you can even give students rewards in their stock portfolio or budget game checking account when they complete their lessons on time!

But an article with a quiz at the end is not the best way to keep student engagement (which is why we have our games to begin with – to bring more excitement to your classroom). This is why we have been working hard to update our lesson library with more and more video content!

Introducing PersonalFinanceLab’s Video Libraries

Our team of financial literacy experts works to release new videos every month! These work to supplement core financial literacy concepts in our existing lesson library, but are also available for teachers to use stand-alone in their classes to introduce new topics. Here are some of our latest new releases:

We like to keep our videos short – just a few minutes – to make sure they keep students’ attention and act as an excellent way to introduce new topics to your class.

We are constantly adding new videos to our YouTube channel, and post them up to our Facebook Teacher Group with every release! Follow us to stay up-to-date with the last awesome, engaging resources for your classes!

Happy Learning

-The PFinLab Team

PersonalFinanceLab’s Budget Game is an awesome tool to help students master the core skills needed to build a healthy financial future. But while students are progressing from month to month, it can be hard to tell how well they are doing – apart from their Class Ranking.

With this in mind, we’re excited to announce our new Monthly Feedback system!

Monthly Feedback

When students finish each month of the Budget Game, they will get a prompt outlining how much progress they made towards each of the core game objectives:

• Setting (and hitting) realistic savings goals
• Building an Emergency Fund of at least $1,000
• Building their Credit Score through responsible credit habits, and
• Once they are on the right track for their other goals, spending responsibly to maintain a high Quality of Life.

We outline this in each step of our new Feedback System!

General Stats

First, students get a snapshot of the big items for the game:

1. Bills Paid On Time: what percentage of their bills did they pay before the due date? In the example above, I was late on most of my bills. Later in the feedback I will see exactly what this means for my financial future!
2. Total Late Fees: I was late on several bills – but not every bill has the same penalties for being late. This is the total amount of late fees I accumulated this month (hopefully $0!).
3. Total Interest Charged: If I am carrying a balance on my Credit Card, this will show the total interest charges I accumulated this month (again, hopefully $0!)
4. And Total Interest Earned: At the end of each month, students earn interest on their savings account. This shows how much I earned this month.

Savings Goal Feedback

Next, students get a summary of how well they worked towards their savings goal. Their feedback is based on two factors:

1. Did they hit their savings goal for this month, and
2. Was their savings goal above 10% or 5% of their expected income for the month

The feedback they get will congratulate them on hitting goals, with additional feedback on making sure to try to hit 10% of their expected income.

Credit Score

Next, students get feedback on how their credit score changed this month. Credit score improves as students pay bills on time and use their credit card responsibly (with the most points earned by using their credit card a bit, but paying off the full amount on time), with points lost by over-using their credit card or being late on bill payments.

The feedback students get will depend on how their credit score changed this month, with specific hints on what to do next month to earn the maximum points.

Quality of Life

The last feedback they get is on their Quality of Life – showing their total current score. Their specific feedback items are actually based mostly on their Emergency Fund – if students have not yet saved up a full $1,000 in their Savings Account, their feedback will remind them to work on saving up before spending extra cash. If they have built up their $1,000 fund, it will then confirm they are still setting (and hitting) that 10% savings goal.

If their savings are in good shape, then the game will congratulate them, and suggest they continue to invest in their Quality of Life as well – including buying new items for their Apartment.

We hope the End Of Month Feedback will bring the learning experience of the Budget Game to a whole new level, and help students really keep focus on the goals that matter.

Happy Learning!

-The PFinLab Team

Using a stock game in class to teach about investing has been a staple of classrooms for decades. And for the whole time, building a portfolio has been a great group activity to help students work and learn together.

But there is always one nagging problem with every group project – how can teachers measure the contribution of each team member?

Introducing Teams!

“Teams” is a feature of PersonalFinanceLab that allows teachers to put their students in groups for the Stock Game. Students in a Team still have their own login and their own individual portfolio, but it also adds a new Team Portfolio and Team Ranking, which aggregates all the team members together.

Creating Teams

After you have set up your class and gotten your students registered, teachers can create and manage Teams from their administration menu:

On the Manage Teams page, you will see all of your students without a team on the left side, and all of the current teams on the right side.

To create your first team, click the “Add Team” button on the top right.

All you need to do is set a username for each team. Like student usernames, they must be unique across all classes.

Once you have created a team, use the dropdown next to each student’s username to add them to a team. You can also remove students from a team at any time by clicking “View Team”, and removing a student. Students can be added or removed from teams at any time.

How Teams Work

When a student is in a team, they have two new items appear on their menu – “Team Portfolio” and “Team Rankings”.

Students still make their own trades in their own portfolio – but the Team Portfolio page shows the combined positions of everyone on that team, so they can coordinate their strategies.

For the Team Rankings, the portfolios of all team members are combined, and teams are ranked by their percentage return. This means it is okay to have teams with different numbers of team members – even though one team might have a combined portfolio value of $500,000 and another team might only have $100,000, the ranking will be based on how much their investment has grown (not just $500,000 vs $100,000).

Best of all, because each student has their own login, as the teacher you can still see what the contribution of each team member is – no more free riding!

We hope teams help take your class stock game to the next level – happy trading!

-The PFinLab Team

Picture this – you set up your class stock and budget games, along with assignments with tutorials and other info you want students to work through before finishing the games. But students always seem to want to play first, learn later. How can you incentivize them to get through their lessons and quizzes first?

Introducing Assignment Rewards

When you create an assignment on PersonalFinanceLab, one of the settings at the top is if you want to set a reward. Setting a reward gives students a cash deposit (either as “bonus cash” to their stock game portfolio, or a deposit into their Budget Game checking account). You can choose which type of bonus to give students with a dropdown:

By letting your students know there is a reward to be earned by using Announcements or Messages, it gives a clear incentive to finish the tutorials or other lessons before jumping back into the games.

Getting Creative With Rewards

You can also leverage the Rewards system to really get creative with your class structure. Here are some ideas for your class:

1. Complete The Stock Tutorials Before Trading
   • Set up your class stock game with very little starting cash (say, $100). Then create an assignment requiring students to go through each of the basic investing lessons and tutorial videos, granting a $9,500 cash reward to round out a $10,000 starting portfolio
2. Complete The Budget Game Tutorials Before Starting
   • Set up your class budget game with $0 cash in students checking or savings accounts. Only grant them their first $1,000 to “get started” as a reward for completing the budget game tutorial lessons
3. Connecting the Budgeting and Stock Games
   • Start out your students with very little starting cash in the stock game, and use a speed limit of 1 month for the budgeting game. Then every week, create an assignment requiring students to complete 1 month of the budgeting game, with a reward of $1000 to their Stock Game portfolio. This grants students cash to invest in the stock game when they first complete a month of the Budgeting Game

The combinations are endless – be prepared to get your students excited to finish their quizzes!

Happy Learning!

-The PFinLab Team

The PersonalFinanceLab Budgeting Game is an excellent way to get students thinking about money over time – sometimes even TOO engaging. Teachers may set up a game lasting 18 virtual months with the intention for the class to progress through it over the course of 10 weeks, only to find some students moved too far ahead and finished the whole game early.

How can teachers make sure students all keep the same pacing?

Introducing Speed Limits

“Speed Limits” is a setting for a class budgeting game. Setting a Speed Limit controls how many in-game months a student can progress for each week of real-life time.

For example, if you set up your class with a speed limit of “2”, it means students can complete up to 2 months of the budget game each week. This is cumulative – so after 2 weeks, students can complete up to 4 months (even if they just started), allowing students who need more time to catch up.

Speed Limits are one of your class Budget Game settings. Speed Limits can be set both when creating your class, or later from the “Edit Session Settings” page under “Administration” in the menu.

If your students progress up to the speed limit, the game will let them know with a warning message:

Students who have reached the Speed Limit can instead work on their assignments from the Learning Library, or continue to build their portfolio in the Stock Game while the rest of the class catches up.

We hope this makes it easy to manage your classes, and keep everyone on the right track!

Happy Learning!

-The PFinLab Team

Every teacher has been there – you’ve had your students complete a formative quiz, and you want to review their answers to see where the class is struggling. All the quizzes are graded, but going through every student one-at-a-time to find patterns can be frustrating and time consuming.

This is where our Class Quiz Summaries come in to help!

Class Quiz Summaries

The Class Quiz Summary is a tool available in the teacher administration reports. It can be accessed from the main menu, from “Reports” -> “Assignment Class Progress Reports”.

There are two tabs on this page – the “Progress Report” (where you can see the quiz results from each assignment for each student), and the “View Assignment” (which has the class summaries we’re focusing on today).

At the top of the report, you can find how many students in your class have fully completed this assignment, along with their average grade across all quizzes in this assignment. Note that students who have not yet completed a quiz are counted as “0” (which is why the average grade is so low in the example above – very few students have finished this assignment yet).

Below, for each quiz in this assignment, you can see what percentage of your class has finished, how long (on average) they took, and the average grade (again, students who have not yet taken the quiz are counted as 0).

Digging Deeper

The most valuable information for an educator can be found when you click “Details”. This will give you a breakdown of every question in this quiz, and (of the students who completed it), how many students got this question right and wrong.

This gives teachers a quick and easy birds-eye view of their class for each quiz. With the results above, I can see that most students knew what a “Preferred Stock” is, but I might want to spend a bit more class time covering the fundamentals of what a “stock” actually represents.

We know this will save teachers a lot of time, and make their classes more efficient than ever!

Happy Learning

-The PFinLab Team

Picture this – you are a student playing through the PersonalFinanceLab budgeting game, and you get a prompt – do you want to buy an aquarium? The cost is $100.

In the real world, tons of people buy aquariums – it is a personal preference, but maybe you really like looking at fish. This is a Quality of Life decision. But with just a “buy or don’t” decision, it is hard to make that feel impactful for students. This is where the My Apartment feature comes in!

Introducing My Apartment

The My Apartment function is a place where students can see the impact of the decisions they have made throughout the budget game – and make new decisions too!

When students buy some items through the game, they will appear in their Apartment (like the aquarium example above). Bigger decisions have an impact too – like do they want a cheap, shabby apartment, or a more expensive pad.

An example of a cheap apartment – with cracked windows, many roommates, and leaks from the ceiling

An example of a luxury apartment, with two private bedrooms, granite countertops, and private balcony

The apartment is a great way for students to SEE the impact of their financial decisions. Number metrics like “Net Worth”, “Credit Score” and the balance of their savings account are one thing, but in the real world, there is value to one’s Quality of Life too. The essence of Personal Finance is weighing these decisions!

Showing Off

This means they need to be able to show off – and they can! From your class’s Budget Game Rankings page, there is a button next to each student to visit their “Apartment”, letting each student “visit” each other’s apartments to see how they have developed over the course of the game. This is an excellent launching point for class discussions – did students with the nicest homes meet all of their savings goals? And how is their credit score?

The Apartment brings a whole new dimension to the “Spend vs Save” decisions throughout the games – and a whole new level of engagement for students!

Happy Budgeting!

-The PFinLab Team

You’ve got an important announcement for your students. Maybe you already posted it to your classroom page, and sent out an email. Even wrote it on the board in class.

But if you want to be extra sure they see it, you also want to pop it in front of them while they’re working through the games on PersonalFinanceLab. This is where our Announcements and Messages come in!

Introducing Announcements and Messages

Announcements and Messages are an on-site way to communicate with your students on PersonalFinanceLab.

Using Announcements

An “Announcement” is a message that appears for every page for students while they use the site, appearing at the top right of every page.

Announcements can be text, images, links, or all three. They stay on the page for as long as you have the announcement active. This means Announcements a great way both to remind your students of important things coming up, but also a great way to give recognition to banks or credit unions that sponsored your class’s site license!

Teachers can post Announcements from their Admin menu. Go to “Admin” -> “Post A Message” to post your announcement.

Messages

Messages are another communication tool built into PersonalFinanceLab. The messaging center is an inbox for every student. Students can access their inbox through the message icon next to their username at the top of the page.

If students have unread messages, it will have a flashing indicator here, and on their Dashboard when logging in.

Students using the Stock Game will regularly get system messages about important events in their portfolio – like a stock they are holding issued a dividend or had a split. Students can also manage some of their inquiries to our Technical Support team through the messaging center when Live Chat or Email are not available.

But teachers can also send messages to their full class about important dates and announcements too!

Sending Messages

Teachers can send a message to their class from the Registration File report. Simply go to “Reports” -> “Registration”, and near the top of the page there is a button to “Message All Users”.

Just like email, you will set a subject line and the content of the message, then send! The Messaging System also accepts HTML content, if you want to include things like pictures or links in the message you send (if you aren’t sure how to write HTML, no problem – our support team can help)!

The Bottom Line

Posting Announcements and sending Messages are just one of the many tools teachers have available to reach their students on PersonalFinanceLab, along with their other courseware messaging systems. But it can be an important way to recognize sponsors, or give information you want your students to see explicitly while playing the games.

Starting in Fall 2023, students can also use the Messaging Center to manage their support tickets, removing the need for email entirely – an important improvement to protecting student data privacy. And speaking of privacy – only teachers and our staff can send messages or modify announcements – students cannot directly send messages to each other.

Let us know if you have questions about Announcements or Messages, and good luck this semester!

-The PFinLab Team

You’re planning to use the PersonalFinanceLab stock game in your class. You’ve used stock games before, and have seen some students buy something in the first week, then forget about it until the end of the semester.

You want to encourage students to keep an eye on their portfolio, and re-balance it over time, just like a real retirement account. What can you do?

Introducing Weekly Deposits

Weekly Deposits was designed exactly with this scenario in mind. With Weekly Deposits, you can start off your class stock game with much less “initial cash” – maybe just $500 or $1000 (which is a lot more tangible to students than a $100,000 portfolio).

Then each Monday, the system will automatically deposit extra cash into their account, which students can use to build their portfolio over time – just like a real, growing retirement account.

Here’s How It Works

• When you create your class, choose the “Custom Settings”.
• When you get to the Stock Game settings, you’ll have the option to set a “Weekly Deposit” for your class
  • You can also add weekly deposits later from “Edit Session Settings”
• Now every Monday morning, students will have that extra cash available to invest
• This extra cash is added to their Initial Cash, so it doesn’t count as pure portfolio returns (just like adding cash to a regular brokerage account).

Here’s WHY It Works

With a regular stock game, you will always have a few students who get super engaged and find it to be the best activity of the year. But students who don’t immediately get attracted to investing might not be so enthusiastic.

From our student feedback, the most common reasons for this fall into two buckets:

1. That the starting cash is just too much money – they’ll never have $100,000 in cash, so investing is only really for rich people
2. They spent time at the start of the semester picking a few stocks, and didn’t see a good reason to change their first picks

Weekly Deposits addresses both of these concerns. First, it allows teachers to start off with very little starting cash for their class (as little as $100), which brings down the bar for how much money a person needs before they think about investing.

Second, extra cash is added to their portfolio every week, forcing students to think about what they want to DO with it. Maybe they will add it to the same stocks they already had. But maybe they heard something about what Elon Musk is doing with Tesla this week, or that an AI revolution is making waves with Nvidia – is that something they want to add to their portfolio? And what does that mean for their other holdings?

We think that Weekly Deposits can bring your stock game to a whole new level of engagement – and that’s what we’re all about!

Happy Trading!

-The PFinLab Team

Order your PersonalFinanceLab 3-year school license and get a free ticker

At PersonalFinanceLab.com, we have helped many schools transform their traditional classrooms into exciting Personal Finance or Business Labs by combining our gamified platform with colorful tickers carrying the latest stock prices and business news.

Now with our partnership with our preferred ticker vendor, Rise Display, we are providing schools a voucher for a FREE ticker when they purchase a 3-year PersonalFinanceLab.com school-wide site license.*

Here’s what you get:

Our PersonalFinanceLab.com site offers 4 resources in 1:  a budgeting and money management game, a stock market game, an embedded curriculum, and certification. The School-wide Site License allows all the students at a specific school location to access our platform.

Rise Display’s low cost LED tickers typically ship within 48 hours when in stock. The specifications are as seen below:

• Pixel Pitch: .23 inch (6mm)
• Cabinet Height: 4.6 inches
• Cabinet Widths: 48″, 63″, 78″, 85″, 93″, 122″, or 176″
• Cabinet Depth: 1.9 inches
• Mounting Depth: Adjustable 2.8 to 7.5 inches
• Color Depth: RGB (Full Color) 65,000 color shades
• Network: Hardwire RJ-45 or Wifi
• Weight: 2 pounds per foot
• Max Power: 11.2 watts per foot
• 1 year manufacturer warranty (return to depot)

Please contact your PersonalFinanceLab account manager, fill out this form to get more info on this offer, or visit Rise Display for more information on their tickers.

*Orders must be received by August 1, 2023. When we receive your Purchase Order, we will give you a Rise voucher valid for the ticker and data license described above. Schools will contact Rise to place an order for tickers. Tickers require electricity, wifi internet connection, and installation (mounting brackets included). You may use this voucher as a partial payment on a larger ticker if you wish. The image is representative only. 

Did It Work?

That is the biggest question teachers need to know after using any resource in the classroom – did it actually improve outcomes? And we at PersonalFinanceLab could not agree more.

That is why a year ago we implemented our Pre- and Post- tests as part of our Assignments engine, allowing teachers to see how their students improve over time. Pre- and Post- test data is also an essential part of our design process for our financial literacy games and curriculum, and a big part of our feature roadmap in the future.

That is why we are excited to announce that Pre- and Post- tests are now an automatic part of the student experience on PersonalFinanceLab! This means students will automatically be prompted to complete the pre-test when they first sign into PFinLab, and will be prompted to take the post-test at the end of their class.

What do the Pre- and Post- tests cover?

Our Pre- and Post- tests consist of 29 questions across 5 categories:

1. Saving, Spending, and Budgeting
2. Risk Management and Insurance
3. Using Credit and Debt
4. Investing
5. Earning Income / Employment / Income Taxes

The questions were developed with reference to the Jump$tart national standards for personal finance, and have been developed to be usable for ANY resource that aims to improve outcomes for financial literacy education – not just the PersonalFinanceLab platform. The full methodology on the test development can be found here.

How can I see my students’ results?

Teachers can also have access to the results of the pre- and post- tests for their class.

For teachers who have a site license and create their own sessions, they must simply include an “Assignment” requiring the Pre-Test (set up before their students register and begin using the platform), and another assignment requiring the Post-Test. This can be found in the Assessments section of the assignment creation:

After your students have completed the assessment, you will be able to view their results in the standard Assignment Reports.

Please note that if your students have already signed in and completed the pre-test before you have created your assignment, their results will not be visible (however, our product team can still provide a custom report for your class).

If your class is participating through another public challenge (like our Financial Literacy Challenge), the pre- and post- test results will be available through the standard reports on your Instructor Administration page.

Let us know if you have any feedback – and we look forward to serving your classes soon!

Stash101 shuts down as a money management and investment simulation for schools, with all existing accounts disabled on January 31, 2023.

What happened to Stash101?

Stash is primarily a banking app, which also can include a personal checking account. Stash101 was a free “practice” version with other educational resources built in, designed for schools and help students open their first accounts after graduation.

While there has not been an official press release for the reason Stash101 was shut down, this change happened shortly after an announcement that Stash is changing their partners for the banking side of their app. This may mean that the new version of Stash no longer matched the Stash 101 interface, or that their new partners were not interested in direct marketing to schools and students, as this can create a lot of student data privacy headaches for app providers that do not normally work with schools.

Best Alternative to Stash101 For Schools

While this comes as a blow for many teachers who relied on this app for their personal finance class resources, there are other options!

PersonalFinanceLab is the closest alternative available for schools today, containing a money management/budgeting simulation to manage bank accounts, credit cards, income, expenses, and more over a simulated year, plus a real-time stock game with stocks, ETFs, bonds, mutual funds, options, and more – all configurable by teachers for their own class contests. PersonalFinanceLab is designed specifically for schools and classrooms.

This year, PersonalFinanceLab is holding a free Financial Literacy Month event during the month of April, giving free access to their budgeting game and stock game to all classrooms. Schools interested in setting up their own sessions with their own rules, as well as using their games and resources in the Fall, can acquire a site license for extended access.

About PersonalFinanceLab

PersonalFinanceLab is an online resource that offers budgeting/money management games, stock market/investing games, and standards-aligned financial literacy/economics/business lessons and assessments on our fully-gamified platform for schools.

Teachers can check out our platform through our Teacher Test Drive, or book a demo with one of our specialists today!

For Spring 2023, we have one of the most exciting additions we’ve ever seen to the PersonalFinanceLab Budget Game!

One of the most consistent items of feedback we get from students every semester in our budget game was that most events of the game had no long-term visual impact – a choice to buy an aquarium, for example, might improve their “Quality of Life” score, but they could not actually see what they bought, or compare against other students.

Our new Apartment changes that!

What is the Apartment?

Now every student will have their own place to call “home” as they progress through the budget game. The initial look of their Apartment depends on what students choose for their living arrangements at the start of the game:

This determines where their “stuff” will be when they check later; a run-down crash pad, or a swanky new building. Students will start with the “bare essentials” – folding chairs, a basic bed, and some other necessities.

However, as students progress through the game, their Apartment will start to develop based on their purchasing decisions. Even better, students can choose to purchase additional furniture for their Apartment at any time, contributing to their Quality of Life score!

Students can also visit the Apartments of their classmates at any time from the Rankings page to show off their new digs!

What This Means For Learning

The Apartment is not purely decorative – there are some essential learning enhancements for the classroom. Now with the Apartment:

• Students can “Save Up” for purchases, instead of just the random events that occur in the game
• More opportunities for students to improve their Quality of Life
• Which also can make it harder to set and reach Savings Goals, since students have more temptations to over-spend!

If you want to try out the Apartment for yourself, feel free to hop onto our Teacher Test Drive challenge and complete your first month of the budget game!

Happy Saving!

Gamification has been a buzzword in education for over a decade. Teachers now have access to more games for the classroom than ever, with a dizzying array of options to fill a limited number of weeks in the classroom.

To try to help teachers pick out the best possible options for your students, we want to lay out some of the core concepts of what gamification is, why it works in education, and some best practices for classroom implementation.

What Makes a Game?

Games have a formal definition, but that is boring, so let’s skip it. Instead, what really matters for gamification in the classroom is that a “game” consists of some goal the “players” are encouraged to achieve, and there are rules in place. Players start by learning the basics of the rules, then using those rules to reach the game’s objective.

A good game makes the person playing it feel clever when they succeed – hit that nice dopamine rush and build some excitement. This is the secret of why games work in education: this chemical reaction in the brain reinforces what worked, and helps students remember it later.

Okay, But What Makes A GOOD Educational Game?

People learn far more from their successes than their failures. A good game in education leverages that fact to hack the dopamine rush from games to crystalize important class concepts. This is the real tricky part for schools though; just because a game is FUN does not mean it is GOOD for use in the classroom.

Bind The Rules to Concepts

For a game to be effective in the classroom, the rules of the game need to be intricately wound around the important class concepts. This means that a student will not be able to understand what is happening in the game (let alone succeed) unless they have the class concepts mastered.

Here’s an example: “The Game of Life” by Hasbro is one of the most popular board games, and on paper it should cover most of the bases of what you want to talk about in a Personal Finance class. There are careers, retirement, family planning, cash transactions, and can be a lot of fun. But the Game of Life is really a poor game to use to actually teach personal finance concepts.

The actual gameplay does not require students to really know what is going on. Sure, they might have to make a payment towards a loan, but that does nothing to help understand how loans work (or when they are a good vs bad idea). Yes, there is money changing hands, but the winner is just who collects the most money by the end of the game. There is not really a “right” or “wrong” way to play, so students only get that sweet, sweet dopamine rush purely by chance, so nothing from the learning process is reinforced. This can be contrasted with PersonalFinanceLab’s Budget Game, where one of the key component’s of a student’s overall game score is their credit score. It is not possible for a student to improve that without fundamentally knowing what a credit score is, how their credit card works, and how to use it responsibly.

With that said, the Game of Life might be a good opportunity to add some financial terms into the vocabulary of kids, just not an effective tool to really teach financial literacy.

Have Many Opportunities For Small Wins

A good educational game makes sure students have a lot of “baby steps” from start to finish. Remember – the real crystallization of the knowledge we want students to walk away with happens when they use the rules of the game to have some success, so having many opportunities of small, meaningful wins along the way is crucial.

We can use the Game of Life as another example here. The totality of the player’s finishing position of the game is based on how much cash they have at the very end. The game is also set up to have plenty of events happen throughout the game that can instantly boost players who may be lagging or knock the current leader off the top spot. This is what makes the game more fun and exciting for students to play – if the winner was clear by the ½ way point, it becomes boring for the other players. But for use in education, it means there is no real small win – either they win it all, or they win nothing. Even the “positive” events in the game lose their potency when they can be erased by bad luck on the next spin of the wheel.

In our budgeting game, we take the opposite approach. The biggest component of the total score a student receives comes from setting and hitting savings goals every “month” of the game. Those points build up over the course of the game, and students maximize their monthly gain by following a basic “Pay Yourself First” mentality (save at least 10% of their total income). This gives an opportunity for a “small win” on a regular basis by putting into practice a core concept of what we are trying to teach.

Related – Watch our Webinar About Gamifying Your Classroom

Short Term vs Long Term Games

Okay, so now we know what makes a game work for education. But what about time frame?

Short Term, or Mini-Games

Short games are the easiest to implement – usually taking one class period or less. We consider these to be “Mini-Games”. The most basic (and least fun) would be a pop quiz, but this can be a far more involved exercise. All of the games provided by NextGen Personal Finance’s Arcade fall into this category, and here at PersonalFinanceLab we have some of our own mini-games embedded into lessons in our curriculum library.

Short games can be very effective at highlighting one specific class concept and giving students a more memorable experience to help recall that concept later. But beware of short games with high ambitions – there is only so much that students can take away from a 20 minute activity.

Long-Term Games

Long-Term Games, by definition, cannot be completed in a single class period. We think of these games as an embedded part of the class itself, helping to underpin concepts by having students revisit over several weeks (or even months). Long-term games usually do require a class period to “launch”, but then students revisit on the side later throughout the class. These types of games work much better when the “rules” of the game are set up to really reflect what the student should be taking away from the core class concepts, and they can continue to improve their game performance by leveraging their better understanding of the “rules” as time goes on.

Short vs Long Term Games – An Example

In the NextGen Arcade I linked to earlier, one of their popular games is called Stax. Stax is an investing mini-game where students allocate money over a 20-year period across different types of investments. This is an educational game designed to be used as part of one class period during an Investments unit.

A student who plays the Stax game is going to be more likely to remember the difference between the rate of return of a bond and a stock index than a student who did not – a short, specific lesson that is easy to digest.

This contrasts with the PersonalFinanceLab Stock Game, which is a long-term game where students build their portfolio of real stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and more (depending on how a teacher sets up their class). This is designed for students to build and manage their portfolio over the course of several weeks, conduct research on their investments, and see how real-world news impacts their portfolio over time. By leveraging this long-term game, students not only learn about the difference between the security types, but will remember years from now the day when their portfolio suddenly spiked (or dropped) by 10%. Not only that, but they also have the opportunity to explore they “why” of how events in the real world intertwine to impact the health of their portfolio. Teachers can even set up their class to automatically deposit cash into student’s accounts every week that needs to be re-invested, like an accelerated version of building an IRA in the real world.

At PersonalFinanceLab, we advocate teachers use long-term games whenever possible – our recommended personal finance course outlines (available for 18-week semester, 9-week quarter, and 3-week enrichment classes) to leverage the repetition, small wins over a longer time, and constant reinforcement of core concepts. That does not mean teachers should avoid mini-games (they are absolutely fantastic resource), but leveraging the longer term whenever possible will get the best long-term impact for student outcomes.

Related – Watch our webinar about long-term games in the classroom

Get In Touch

Have any thoughts or comments on this article? Join our Teacher Group on Facebook to join the conversation!

About The Author

Kevin Smith is the Director of Product Development for PersonalFinanceLab. He has an academic background in economics and game theory, with a Master’s of Economics from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, and a join Master of Public Policy and Administration / MBA from the Stuart School of Business in Chicago, Illinois.

This Fall, new and returning teachers can look forward to using their favorite LMS for registering their students to their PersonalFinanceLab class. You will need an active account to be able to take advantage of this new integration. However, once you have your site license, you can take advantage of single sign-on through platforms like Canvas, Schoology, Blackboard, Moodle or D2L.

The best part is that your students won’t have to remember an extra username and password! They can seamlessly get access to the Stock Game, Budget Game and our curriculum library through whatever interface they’re already familiar with.

How It Works

Our new integration utilizes LTI Deep Linking to connect your students’ account on your LMS system directly to PersonalFinanceLab.

What this means is that after the first configuration of the LMS with PersonalFinanceLab, teachers can add PersonalFinanceLab as a resource to their class. After setting your class rules, students can click to sign in directly from the LMS – and only from your LMS (to help with rostering support), with first-time sign-up under their “Assignments”.

This makes it faster, easier, and more secure to get your classes set up and students registered than ever!

Please note that students who register to PFinLab through our regular registration path can NOT enable single sign-on to their LMS account later. Students also MUST log into PersonalFinanceLab via your classroom portal, since their accounts will be permanently tied to your LMS. The first-time setup of our LMS integration with your school also may take some coordination with your IT department – please ask your account manager for details.

Clever Integration

Our full LMS integration will require some coordination with your school’s IT department to get up and running. For schools that already leverage Clever for single sign-on, you’re covered too!

To take advantage of Clever, first add PersonalFinanceLab as an App in Clever for your classroom (this will allow students to access PFinLab with their Clever account).

Next, create your class with your PersonalFinanceLab, and get your unique class invite link, and share this link with your students.

Finally, when students click the link to create their accounts, they will “Sign up with Clever” instead of entering their other registration to complete the connection:

Unlike the full LMS integration, students who register through any other method (for example, if you as the teacher generated logins for each student instead of sharing the class registration link) can connect to their Clever account at any time from the “Edit Profile” page.

This means if you are a returning teacher who uses Clever, you can connect your existing teacher account too!

Google Classroom

For schools that use Google Classroom, we have you covered too! Your students’ Google accounts can also be used for Single Sign-On, with the same steps as Clever. Students will just “Login With Google”, and they are good to go!

If you need any help getting started, please contact our Helpdesk or your dedicated account manager. We are here to help!

Hey teachers – we have a major update in store for you this Fall! From budget game graphics updates to currency trading and everything in between, this might be our biggest update ever!

Clever Integration

We are making it easier than ever to get students registered into your class! Starting this Fall, teachers can add PersonalFinanceLab as an “App” in Clever, and have students join directly to their class via their Clever accounts. It has never been so easy to roster your entire class!

Class Quick-Create

Speaking of fast and easy, we’ve made it faster and easier than ever to set up your PFinLab class too! One of the greatest parts of PFinLab is the ability to tailor your class exactly how you want, with over 200 settings between the budget game and stock game to choose from.

But sometimes you just want to set up with the recommended settings and go! And now you can! When teachers set up their classes for this Fall, they will have the option to use either an “Express” set-up (using our default settings, preferred by most teachers), or “Custom”, to tweak their session options to best suit their class.

LMS Single Sign-On

We weren’t done with just Clever for single-sign on either! This Fall will also see the launch of the PersonalFinanceLab Deep Linking functionality, which will allow single sign-on and rostering between PFinLab and Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, BrightSpace, and Sakai LMS systems!

Integrating these LMS systems is not quite as “turnkey” as Clever – schools who are interested in LMS integration will need to reach out to their Account Manager, as some configuration will be needed with your school’s IT department.

Budget Game – “My Apartment”

Our budgeting game is a fantastic resource for teaching students about cash management and budgeting, and this fall we’re launching a major update based on user feedback!

The current game is based on the student moving forward through time, but it can be too easy to forget some of the choices made in the past, or feel that some options have less impact. With this update, every student will have their own “Apartment”, which will fill over time with purchases based on the decisions they’ve made in the game. Students will also have the opportunity to save up for bigger purchases, like a vacation package or new TV, instead of waiting for events to pop up in the flow of normal gameplay.

Students will even be able to visit each other’s Apartments from the rankings page!

Of course this is a new threat to their monthly savings goals – making it an even better learning experience on how to prioritize and Pay Yourself First!

Assignment Statistics Reporting

Teachers that that PersonalFinanceLab’s built-in lessons, videos, and curriculum will notice a major improvement to our on-site reporting.

Our previous versions would simply report the grades and whether or not a student completed the tasks that they were assigned. This semester’s update gives a lot deeper dive, both for each student and for the entire class. New data points include:

• The total time taken for each task you’ve assigned
• The individual responses students made to each quiz question (and whether it was “correct” or “incorrect”)
• If your class allows students to re-try the quizzes, you will also get a count of their number of attempts, and responses for each attempt
• Class summaries for the average time all students have taken per task, and average grades on each quiz

Curriculum Unit Introductions and Assessments

This is another update for our Personal Finance professors! PersonalFinanceLab includes over 300 lessons to teach financial literacy concepts. To help break this up for students, we have added new Unit Introductions and Unit Assessments for each of our 5 major content areas (Budgeting, Investing, Insurance, Credit, and Financial Decision Making), with automatically graded assessments for each unit.

Using the introductions and unit assessments is, of course, optional – you can still mix and match lessons in any order to match your preferred course structure.

Improved Option Spread Margins and Trading

Classes that do a deep-dive into investing are in for a major update too! This Fall’s update also includes a major change to our option spread mechanics.

Our previous system only supported a limited number of options, with a trading interface that some students thought limited their trading ability (or worse, were not sure how to enter orders for certain types of spreads).

This semester’s update completely revamps the option spreads trading pit, and makes margin calculations consistent regardless of whether students trade one leg at a time, or together as a spread. Best of all, each spread type also includes a short description of how it works, and a payoff diagram showing students their profit and loss profile based on the spread they are attempting to place!

Multi-Legged Option Spreads

Our improvements to our existing option spreads was really just a lead-up to a major overhaul of the spreads system to include many more spread types. Students can now place 3- and 4-legged option spreads in a single order. So bring on the Butterflies and Condors – along with snippet descriptions and profit diagrams to help students get started!

Real-Time Forex Trading

We have supported forex trading using real-time prices to execute trades for many years, but due to restrictions from our data vendors, we could only display delayed prices.

However, starting this Fall, we have a new data vendor for our currency feeds, now allowing all users to see the real-time bid/ask prices right from the trading pit.

Messaging Center

The last major update for this Fall is our new messaging center, built right into the PFinLab platform. This new inbox system will alert students of splits, dividends, or other corporate actions that have impacted their account, give updates on any support tickets with questions, allow teachers to directly message their students (or even their entire class), and more!

This is especially helpful for schools using pre-generated accounts, or where students normally are not able to contact our support team by email – they will also get updates straight to their PFinLab inbox!

Our messaging center is designed to keep your students updated with their PFinLab class – this is a new enhancement to the Forum feature that has been part of the system for the last several years. Students will not be able to send messages to other students, or across classes.

And Much More!

There are also dozens of behind-the-scenes improvements to site performance, report exports, and tweaks to make PersonalFinanceLab a more valuable tool than ever for your classes. We are looking forward to serving your classes this Fall!

Don’t Have A License For Your School?

If your school does not yet have a site license for PFinLab, or if you need to renew your license for the new semester, feel free to fill out the form below and our account managers will be in touch soon!

PersonalFinanceLab.com is used by nearly 1,000 teachers each year and we love getting to know each and every one of them! Everyday we are impressed by their dedication and the many unique and innovative ways to teach students about Personal Finance. Today we celebrate one of our many outstanding educators — Terry Ley, a high school Personal Finance, Accounting, Microsoft Applications, and Web Design teacher. 

How do you incorporate PersonalFinanceLab into your unique cirriculum?

Ley: “It’s [PersonalFinanceLab] definitely planned into the curriculum. [..] Once we finish my budgeting unit, then we play [The Budget Game]. And they [students] play that for two months.

I’ve created a worksheet that goes with it. And they have to answer questions along the way. It includes challenges they’ve had, things that went well, what they would do differently the next time they play, and then life lessons that they’ve learned. Then we will play again, later in the semester, as we learn more about credit cards and all that.

I also just introduced the stock market game. In my class, we just learned about stocks. Today, I’m finishing up teaching them about mutual funds. And so this week, in the stock market game, they have to buy two stocks and one mutual fund. And I require that they spend about $10,000, every week on three different stocks or stocks and mutual funds. So that way, they’re always researching and always trying to discover new, hot stocks that they think will do well.”

How do you make teaching financial literacy relevant to students’ lives today? 

Ley: “I work really hard to make my class very real life and very relevant. I love the budget game, because it’s the unexpected expenses [that] come up, and they have to deal with them. And, you know, some kids complain, ‘I had three flat tires last week or two speeding tickets,’ and they’re frustrated with that. But you know, I’d say, Well, does that ever happen? And then, they have got to find a way to deal with it. But yes, I try to incorporate as much real life into my classes as I can.”

How do you grade students on their use of the Budget Game?

Ley: “I do not grade on performance of their investments, I just grade that they have purchased three brand new stocks. Every student has a a paper copy of a portfolio and they have to fill out the portfolio. They have to go get all the information, like earnings per share, PE ratio, earnings growth, PEG ratio, large cap/small cap, what is the value of that, the 52 week range, the beta number. I want them to actually have to do some research. And I’ve have guest speakers come in and talk about what type of beta number to look for? What beta number are they looking for? What’s a good PE ratio? That type of thing. And so they have some guidelines, and hopefully those guidelines from our guess speakers guide them as they make their choices.”

What do you love most about PersonalFinanceLab?

Ley: “I love PersonalFinanceLab, because it has the two parts to it — the Budget Game and the Stock Market Game. The Budget Game is super engaging for the students. And it’s fun to sit back once they’re into it. And the students start talking and chatting with, you know, their neighbors about the good things going on, or the frustrating things going on. And what I love, particularly about the Budget Game, is that it incorporates their credit score and lifestyle, that type of thing. They have to think about the ramifications of partying too much on the weekend, or studying too much and not doing other things, or if they don’t work. And so it incorporates a lot of extra things that they need to really think about and not just doing one thing and trying to get a high score. So it’s a great fit into a classroom […] overall, it’s a great, great addition to my class.”

PersonalFinanceLab.com is used by nearly 1,000 teachers each year. In our conversations with many of them throughout the year, we are constantly impressed by their dedication and the many unique and innovative ways to teach students about Personal Finance. Today we celebrate one of our many outstanding teachers. Robert Fredette, a 10th grade Financial Independence teacher.

How do you incorporate PersonalFinanceLab into your unique teaching style? 

Fredette: “We use it [PersonalFinanceLab] as a primary tool, I use it […] like an evaluation tool of what we’ve talked about all year long. We set the game up right at the end of the semester. And I usually run it for about 18 months or so. I do like three months of being a student in the game, and then they move to being a full time worker.
And I also look at […] where we’re at in the economy, what hourly wages seem like, I go through what rents look like, and try to mirror, at least a little bit of what might be really out there. So we’re not taking a test […] what we’re doing is, we’re experiencing this game. And now the students are explaining  the different concepts of money– and what we’ve talked about– and how they’re applying it in the game, what’s happening in the game, and how they’re feeling about the learning process of the game.”

How do you make teaching financial literacy relevant to students’ lives today? 

Fredette: “I think the ‘relevance’ part of teaching is really where we connect with kids. For me, it started with doing some simulations with financial independence. And that was good. But it wasn’t the Budget Game.
We were able to talk about events that happened in the game. And the online part of our school just went from me teaching, or trying to teach a PowerPoint slide to them interacting with a game, having an experience, and then being able to reflect on it, relate with it, and then communicate and talk about it as a group. And kids had similar experiences sometimes or different ones, and so that they were all able to share. And so it really made our online time really, really, so much better.”

How do you grade students on their use of the Budget Game?

Fredette: “At the end [of the semester], they write a paper that addresses things like, ‘what ways do you think differently about how to manage your finances?’ So things like personal decision making, earning and reporting income, budgeting and savings. And they have to write a summary paper about how they felt after they played the game and took the class.”

What is your favourite thing about PersonalFinanceLab?

Fredette: “As I was reading some of these [student reports], […] there are so many times as a teacher, I could stand up and talk about budgeting and save this for that, and don’t spend here […] and you know, what really connected with them is this game, this game made that connection more relevant and deeper than me just explaining that to them. […] This has changed their thought process. And that’s what I kind of look at when I read their summaries.”

There are a lot of new enhancements that will improve how both teachers and students use PersonalFinanceLab!

Spring 2022 Key Updates

• Dozens of new graphics for event cards
• Lesson Cards have been improved with multiple-choice quizzes

• Personal Finance curriculum has new sub-units based on the Jumpstart/Council for Economic Education standards. Each sub-unit has a short introduction and short unit review quiz.

• Instructors can view the individual quiz responses from each student to see where they got questions right and or wrong, along with the time taken to complete each lesson and quiz.

• Professors will have summary reports for their class showing the average time to complete each lesson and quiz for the entire class, along with statistics on the right/wrong averages for the class on every quiz question.

   

New Graphics

Our design team has been hard at work to bring more gamified elements to the pop-up choice and event cards in the Budget Game. As students play, they encounter some choice cards that ask them to spend money with either their debit or credit cards. Giving them the opportunity to practice using a credit card before they may have received one in real-life.

Other choice cards ask students to decide if they want to purchase or participate in an activity at all. All these choices they make have consequences. The latest enhancement will tie in similar graphics across cards to thematically represent how choosing one option over another has long-term consequences.

Pop-Up Lessons

In response to requests from teachers, we’ve changed how students enter their answers into the pop-up lessons in the Budget Game. Before it was an open text field, and often students were getting stuck and couldn’t move forward. Now we will have a dropdown multiple choice list so students can still test their knowledge, but can quickly and easily keep playing after completing a lesson.

Assignment Sub-Units

With over 300+ lessons, it can be difficult to know where to start; this enhancement will group our personal finance lessons according to Jump$tart standards. Not only does it make it easy to identify the lessons that reinforce knowledge statements like budgeting, credit, financial risk and decision making etc. but it allows teachers to quickly assign a whole sub-unit at a time.

By adding an introduction and exit quiz, you can be reassured that your student will be prepared for the lessons, and will be assessed on their knowledge at the end. 

Student Progress & Assessments

Teacher reports just got a whole lot more useful by allowing you to see EXACTLY which questions your students are getting right or wrong. You will be able to see trends, and cover the concepts in more depth that students are struggling with. Similarly, you will know what has been firmly understood so you can safely move on to new material!

On top of what students got right or wrong, you will be able to see how much time it took to complete the quizzes. This is a great way to know which students are not being challenged enough, or who is struggling. Over time, you will see what topics your students need more time with so you can allocate class time accordingly.

Offering you four exciting and fun features:

• A Personal Budget Game
• A Stock Game
• Built-in Lessons with Pop Quizzes
• National Challenge with the opportunity to win prizes

5 great reasons to register yourself to the challenge!

• You will gain valuable experience by building a monthly budget
• You will learn how to manage your checking and savings accounts, credit cards, and stock portfolios
• Tutorial videos will walk you through everything step of the way
• You will practice what you learn in class before using your real money
• It’s free, and it’s super fun – you can compete with your friends and practice your knowledge in an interactive game!

Dates: Registration is now open. Challenge runs from March 28th to April 29th, 2022.

Prizes: The Top 10 students from each contest, (from the Budget Game and Stock Game) win a $100 Amazon gift card for their classroom. Teachers of the top-performing finalists will be notified the week after the challenge ends. Teachers will decide how the prizes will be spent for their class.

We will also send a trophy to the top-performing school in the Stock Game!

How does it work? You must complete 12 virtual months of our Personal Budgeting Game, and build a diversified portfolio of stocks, ETFs, bonds, and mutual funds to be eligible for prizes.

You can earn a certificate in Personal Finance by completing all the included lessons as well – this certification will look amazing in your curriculum in the future!

Register yourself for our FREE Spring 2022 Financial Literacy Challenge!

Stock Game Rules

• Trading is open from March 28th to April 29th, 2022
• Trade US stocks and ETFs, and US mutual funds, and bonds
• Manage a $100,000 virtual portfolio
• Weekly deposits of $1000 will be distributed for students to begin trading on Monday mornings
• There is a $5 minimum price for all stocks
• You can short sell and buy on margin
• You can day trade
• You can only invest 25% of their portfolio in any one security
• Each student is allowed only one entry

All results are subject to an audit to verify accuracy by the PersonalFinanceLab team. The results of the audit are final.

Budget Game Rules

• You can play the Budget Game from March 28th to April 29th, 2022.
• The game includes 12 months of gameplay where you manage bills and expenses.
• Start as a college student with a part-time job, and after 6 months graduate and take on a full-time job.
• You earn the most amount of points for meeting your monthly savings goals.

Optional Completion Certificate 

• It’s not obligatory to complete all the lessons to be eligible for prizes.
• If you want to learn more, the included curriculum comprises 86 individual assignments on investing and personal finance.
• Each lesson includes a pop quiz at the end with 3-5 questions.
• You are required to get 100% on all quizzes to earn the completion certificate.
• You can retake quizzes to improve your score.
• Example assignments include:
  • What is the New York Stock Exchange?
  • Investing Strategies
  • Pay Down Debt or Save?
  • Life Insurance
  • Use the Saving to be a Millionaire Calculator

Watch our new teacher tutorial video with an overview of our budget game, stock game, curriculum library, and how to set up a class!

Want More Info?

Stock Game

 

Customize the exchanges and securities to suit the level of difficulty for your students. We have loads of tutorial videos on researching and understanding the different types of markets. We also have live data and quoting tools to allow students to perform all their research before investing in our site.
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How to Use the Stock Game?

If you are not sure how to use our stock game, click the button below! 

Preview Lessons

 

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Using the Budget Game

 

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The Embedded Curriculum

 

The curriculum and assignments: choose from investing, personal finance, economics, accounting, marketing, management and more. All grades and progress are exportable into convenient reports to integrate with your other lesson plans.
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6 Subjects, One Tool

In addition to Personal Finance lessons, PersonalFinanceLab.com also includes dozens of integrated activities for economics, accounting, investments, marketing, and management classes!

Using the Stock Game

 

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The Personal Budget Game

 

Personal Budgeting Game is set up as a calendar. Students experience managing their own bills, fixed and variable expenses and meeting their savings goals as either a full-time student with a part-time job or a full-time professional. Pop-up lessons integrate core lessons like “Needs vs Wants” or “Credit Cards.” Each month of gameplay takes 20 minutes. However, student progress is saved so this is an excellent bell ringer!
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How to Use the Budget Game?

If you are not sure how to use our budget game, click the button below! 

Our team has been busy this summer rolling out improvements to make teaching financial literacy and personal finance that much easier. Check out all the new features that will be available for this fall semester.

Budget Game

• Improved Bank and Credit Card Statements – student’s checking account, savings account, and credit card statements are new and improved to look like real online banking sites. You can see them yourself here!
• Summary Statements – brings all the relevant details for each student’s activities while on the site in one place for a birds-eye view of their financial health.
• Full-Time Mode Changes – the Budget Game has two game modes – a student with a part-time job, or a full-time worker who just started their first job. Both versions have a multitude of minor improvements, but the biggest difference is that paychecks are only distributed once every two weeks instead of weekly for full-time mode.

Better Graphics

Our graphic design team has been hard at work as well, adding new illustrations and graphics throughout the game to bring each scenario to life. Check out a sneak preview from the gallery below.

Advanced Assignment Tracking

• Time Tracking –you will now have the estimated time of completion for each lesson that you assign your students. This will give you a clear picture on how much time it will take to complete their work. We also are adding time tracking to each lesson, so you can see how much time each student in your class takes to finish each lesson and its accompanying assessment.
• Grade Tracking – previously our system would track the score students received on each assessment, but not their answers to each individual question. This update will give you question-level insights for each student. If you allow students to re-take the assessments associated with each lesson, you can see their answers from each attempt.
• Class Summary Statistics – this adds new class summary reporting, so you can see how long the average student in your class takes to complete each lesson, along with summary statistics on which individual questions in our assessments are frequently missed.

New Student Dashboard

We brought the student’s progress on your class Assignments front and center, so students are immediately greeted with what they need to focus on first.
If your class is utilizing our Budgeting Game, their current game progress comes up with a button to continue from where they left off. They’ll also see their open positions and a snapshot of their portfolio. If your class is not utilizing the budget game or assignments, this will appear right on top.

The new dashboard is the featured image for this post!

Financial Literacy Lesson Update

Investing101 Update

Our Investing 101 curriculum is a great refresher for students on the fundamentals of investing as well as an essential component to department-wide or campus-wide investing competitions to help promote financial literacy. Our 10-chapter, 100-lesson course has undergone a comprehensive overhaul in light of changing trends in the investing world since its first launch. Highlights to the update include:

• More and improved short video tutorials
• Enhanced introductions to each covered security type, what they fundamentally represent, and how they can be combined for specific investing objectives
• Complete revision of our chapters on Fundamental and Technical Analysis
• Both new and improved tutorials on utilizing stock screeners and making your first trade
• Improved focus on personal investing, including a discussion of tax advantages of “Buy and Hold” investing
• Revamped chapter on Current Hot Topics in Trading, including lessons on cryptocurrencies, short squeezes, and ESG investing
• Each chapter of Investing101 now includes two separate assessments – a short vocabulary quiz followed by a longer quiz on the substance of the chapter.

Financial Literacy Update

Our Financial Literacy lesson library has also received a major update. In addition to bringing our taxation lessons up-to-date with current tax policy and dozens of updates to our existing lessons, many new lessons have also been added. These include:

• Unit introduction on taxation
• Career development and the impact of different types of education
• Charities and including giving in a spending plan
• Simple and living wills
• Understanding apartment rental agreements and obligations
• Employer and employee rights and responsibilities
• Using spreadsheets to compare loan terms to see which is a better deal
• As with all of our lessons, each of our new lessons is bite-sized to take students 10 minutes or less, with an automatic assessment to check for understanding.
• Our financial literacy lessons are perfect for Personal Finance classes utilizing both our portfolio simulation and personal budgeting game, or an excellent supplement to any business or finance class to ensure your students have exposure to the essential skills they need after graduation.

Coming Soon…

Course outlines on budgeting, investing, credit and other financial literacy topics to make it that much easier to integrate our platform into your curriculum. Once all the materials have been prepared, we’ll have a separate announcement to help explain to teachers how they can integrate this in their classes.

Many CTE programs across the country already use PersonalFinanceLab!

Find out what you and your students are missing!

Research shows the students learn more by doing than by listening. And at PersonalFinanceLab.com, we totally believe that!

Our simulations let your students “DO” Personal Finance so that they will remember it. Perhaps more than any other skill, learning to manage your money is a lesson that will truly last a lifetime.

PersonalFinanceLab offers 4 tools in 1 site to help YOU teach and to make sure your students LEARN.

With one easy to use site, your students will:

• Play 12 virtual months of our Personal Budgeting Game, so they get to experience building a monthly budget and managing their monthly cash inflows, outflows, net worth, credit score, etc.
• Experience the ups and downs of the stock market as they build a virtual stock portfolio
• Supplement their knowledge with the embedded curriculum that teaches practical money skills, and…
• Earn a variety of certifications

This is a teacher introduction to the PersonalFinanceLab platform, with an overview of our budget game, stock game, curriculum library, gamification engine, and assessments.

Discover why the Budget Game, Stock Game and our Learning Library of assignments and lesson plans will transform how you teach financial literacy. And make teaching more fun, curriculum planning easy, and improve student engagement!

The Stock Game

• Teachers can customize the types of securities students can trade, the diversification, and amount of trades per day. The stock game provides integrated research and reports so students can make smarter investment choices. Great for distance learning, and engaging students through healthy competition and portfolio rankings.

Completely Customizable

Our stock game can be perfectly tailored for your class. Choose your own class contest length and dates, what students can trade (stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, bonds, commodities – even cryptocurrencies!), how students need to diversify, and over 50 different settings!

You can even require students to take notes with every trade to connect the stock game back to your current course topics, use the built-in forums to drive class discussion, and post messages and alerts for your class!

This makes our stock game the perfect centerpiece for any personal finance, economics, business, entrepreneurship, or accounting class – you pick whatever rules work best for your set of students!

Integrated Research and Reports

Income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, historical prices, accounting ratios, SEC filings, option chains, and over 40 other data points are available in our Research Center. We even integrated company info, analyst ratings, symbol lookup, and charting tools directly into the trading page, so students can do all their investing research all in one place.

Teachers also get access to an unprecedented level of reporting and tracking, with real-time activity reports, diversification reports, trading activity, class summary data, and much more. Best of all, it is completely exportable to Excel or any other spreadsheet program!

Great for group work and homework!

Our Teams feature lets you group students into collaborative portfolios, so you can both see each student’s individual actions while keeping team class rankings as a group project!

Since PersonalFinanceLab.com is entirely web-based with no software to install, students can also track their portfolios from at home or even between classes on any mobile device for the ultimate gamified investing activity.

How to Use the Stock Game?

If you are not sure how to use our stock game, click the button below! 

Want More Info?

The Personal Budget Game

• Students learn how to build an emergency savings fund while balancing their monthly expenses. The game is set-up like a calendar and each “month” of gameplay takes 20 minutes to complete.

• Students make impactful decisions that change the opportunities they face in the game. These choices also affect their Net Worth, Credit Score, and Quality of Life Score. As they play the Budget Game they complete integrated lessons, pop quizzes, and mini-games that make personal budgeting fun and interactive!

Real Life Scenarios & Events

Your students take on the role of either a college student with a part-time job or a graduate just starting their first full-time job. Either way, they are now living on their own, paying all their bills, and managing their variable income, expenses, and lots of unexpected life events!

Teacher Controls Game & Lessons

You set the initial fixed expenses, wages/salaries, income tax rates, and more to make the game unique to your class! You also choose the lessons that pop up and influence what types of “Life Events” occur so your game evolves with the topics you cover in class.

Impactful Decisions

Students need to constantly make financial decisions – work extra hours or spend time studying in school. Buy renter’s insurance this month, or take the risk? Their game score increases as students reach their savings goals, improve their credit score, and build their Quality of Life.

Easy to Use; Full Reporting

Teachers can easily track student progress throughout the game. All transactions they make are exportable to excel or Google sheets; which includes their bank statements, credit card statements, and pay stubs!

With this information students can run activities in the class based on their actions in the game. For instance; cashflow statements, monthly budgets or compare the different choices they made.

How to Use the Budget Game?

If you are not sure how to use our budget game, click the button below! 

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The Embedded Curriculum

• Registering your class to the PersonalFinanceLab comes with an extensive collection of experiential learning exercises to maximize your students’ understanding of personal finance, investing, economics, and business. Assignments include articles, videos, interactive calculators, and exams that are self-graded and included in the students’ progress reports.

6 Subjects, One Tool

In addition to Personal Finance lessons, PersonalFinanceLab.com also includes dozens of integrated activities for economics, accounting, investments, marketing, and management classes!

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8 Reasons Why Your School Needs PersonalFinanceLab

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There are a lot of new enhancements that will improve how both teachers and students use the platform!

General Improvements

New Dashboard

• Our new Dashboard brings all your student’s actions into one place

Live Chat

• PFinLab now has live chat support available for teachers and students (during market hours)

Onboarding

• First-time users now get help to get started on key pages (teachers too!)

Stock Game Enhancements

Weekly Deposits

• Instead of lump-sum cash to invest, students have periodic deposits into their stock game account

Custom Exchanges

Restrict your investing universe! Common uses include:

• Just the S&P 500 or DOW 30
• Only stocks with a strong local presence
• Each student picks 5 stocks at the start that they research, open to everyone to trade

Mutual Fund Research

New mutual fund research tools! See:

• Fund overviews
• Fund performance
• Fund holding
• …plus the same research you can find for Stocks and ETFs!

Spots Trading

• “Cash Spots” trading now supports basic commodities!

Risk Adjusted Rankings

For Finance Classes, improvements to Risk Adjusted Rankings!

• Sharpe Ratio
• Jensen’s Alpha
• Treynor Ratio

Budget Game Enhancements

Images and Colors

Improved Paychecks

• Better transition from Part-Time to Full-Time mode
• Part-Time mode hours are more consistent (14-30 hours, instead of 5-35 hours)

Historical Views

• Students can now look back and see when they had transactions in previous months

Zero-Cost Bills

The game now supports zero-priced bills
• Example: Students do not need to pay rent while still in school (since they live with their parents)

More Long-Term Impacts

• Multi-month discounts on bills
• Card deck shuffles differently depending on a “Status”

Assignment Enhancements

New and Improved Certificates

• Financial Literacy Certificate + Investing101 Certificate
• Students can download the PDF, and they earn a badge to show off on the rankings page!

New Logging System

• Some reports from schools that students were not getting credit
• New assignment logging system opens the doors to more reports in the future!

Administration Enhancements

New and Improved Widgets

• For schools with our Widget Packs, new ranking types, financial data, and even custom widgets now available!

New Fun Facts Report

• Great bell-ringer – see what students are buying and selling for any date range!

Improved Data Exports

• Admins can now pull transaction history and open positions export live
• … But this may fail for VERY large classes (150+ students). Our support team can help!

Offering your students four exciting features to bring some excitement and real-world learning into your classroom:

• A Personal Budget Game
• A Stock Game
• Built-in Lessons with Pop Quizzes
• National Challenge with the opportunity to win prizes

4 great reasons to register your class to the challenge:

• Your students will gain valuable experience by building a monthly budget
• They will learn how to manage their checking and savings accounts, credit cards, and stock portfolios
• Tutorial videos will walk them through everything step of the way.
• Your students will practice what they learn in class before they use real money

If you want a printable PDF to download and share with your students, click here.

Dates: Registration now open. Challenge runs March 22nd to April 30th. Teachers can continue using PersonalFinanceLab for free until June 30th.

Prizes: The Top 20 students from each contest, (from the Budget Game and Stock Game) each win a $100 Amazon gift card for their classroom. Teachers of the top-performing finalists will be notified the week after the challenge ends. They will decide how the prizes will be spent for their class.

*Prizes are based on April 30th, and the winners will be announced on the first week of May. The challenge will remain open until June 15th, so teachers can continue using the games and lessons after the prize period ends.*

About the Challenge: This is a free national competition where students learn about budgeting, credit cards, investing, insurance, income, taxes, and transitioning to their job after school – all in a fun game environment with national rankings and prizes. Students complete 12 virtual months of our Personal Budgeting Game, 30 Financial Literacy lessons, and build a virtual portfolio of stocks, ETFs, bonds, and mutual funds. They can earn a certificate in Personal Finance by completing all the included lessons as well.

Extra-curricular activity: The challenge works excellent as a supplement during Financial Literacy Month with little to no class time requirements – making it perfect for the entire school. The challenge is already set up for you! All you have to do is register, and your students will get access to our budget game, stock game, and assignments. Your students only need around 20 minutes a day to complete a virtual month and the accompanying activities. The best part is that they learn a variety of personal finance lessons at the same time!

Register your class for our FREE Spring 2021 Financial Literacy Challenge!

Stock Game Rules

• Trading is open from March 22nd to June 30th.
• Prizes will be awarded based on the top performing portfolios at market close on April 30th.
• Students may trade US stocks and ETFs, and US mutual funds, and bonds
• Students manage a $100,000 virtual portfolio
• There is a $5 minimum price for all stocks
• Students may short sell and buy on margin
• Students may day trade
• Students may only invest 25% of their portfolio in any one security
• Each student is allowed only one entry
• All results are subject to an audit to verify accuracy by the PersonalFinanceLab team. Results of the audit are final.

Budget Game Rules

• Students can play the Budget Game from March 22nd to June 30th.
• Prizes will be awarded based on the top performing students at the end of the day on April 30th.
• The game includes 12 months of gameplay where students manage their bills and expenses
• They start as students with part-time jobs, and after 6 months graduate and take on full-time jobs
• Students earn the most amount of points for meeting their monthly savings goals
• Learn more about how to play here.

Optional Completion Certificate 

• It’s not obligatory for students to complete all the lessons to be eligible for prizes.
• For students who want to learn more, the included curriculum comprises 86 individual assignments on investing and personal finance.
• Each lesson includes a pop quiz at the end with 3-5 questions.
• Students are required to get 100% on all quizzes to earn the completion certificate.
• Students are able to retake quizzes to improve their score.
• Example assignments include:
  • What is the New York Stock Exchange?
  • Investing Strategies
  • Pay Down Debt or Save?
  • Life Insurance
  • Use the Saving to be a Millionaire Calculator

How to Use PersonalFinanceLab?

If you are not sure how to use our budget game or stock game, click the buttons below! When you are ready, scroll up and click the “Register Now” button! ?

You may or may not have used PersonalFinanceLab in your classes before. Many teachers know how to take advantage of all its resources, but there are always new schools registered that need a basic tutorial on how to use the platform.

With that in mind, we created this post to highlight the main points you should know about the Budget Game. If you have any further questions, check out our tutorial video below.

About the Budget Game

• Your students take on the role of a college student with a part-time job – in most scenarios, students have roommates, so they need to manage shared household expenses for the first part of the game.
• They graduate from school and become a full-time worker part-way through the game – they become a full-time worker (40-hour work per week), with more consistent income, but also with bigger expenses, since they no longer have roommates.
• Emphasis is on managing CASH FLOW and reinforcing PAY YOURSELF FIRST saving strategy – the goal is not necessarily to make students break their expenses down on a spreadsheet. The idea is to make students control and manage their expenses and income to build healthy finance habits.

Students Objectives

• Emergency Fund – Students’ first major goal is to save an Emergency Fund of $1000 – doing so earns a huge point bonus
• Credit Score – Students have a credit card they can use for purchases. Using it responsibly builds up their Credit Score and increases their Credit Limit.
• Savings Goals – We ask students to set a “Savings Goal” every month. Students get bonus points if they save at least 10% of their income every month.
• Quality of Life – Avoiding every expense is not a winning strategy. Students earn “Quality of Life” points by buying nice things, having a better apartment, and spending time with friends
• “Life” Balance – Students also need to take care to spend time on chores or studying – their landlords give inspections and fines, and failing an exam can have big penalties.

Launching the Game

To kick off the game for your class, give them a prompt describing their scenario:

You are taking on the role of a college student in their last semester. You have a part-time job and are sharing an apartment with roommates. You will earn a paycheck each week, have bills to pay, and a credit card you can use – your goal is to build up your Emergency Fund and Credit Score while maintaining a high Quality Life.

After you graduate from school, you will move to a new apartment on your own and start your full-time job. You will have more (and bigger) bills, but also a bigger, steady paycheck. Keep hitting your Savings Goals and keep a high Credit Score and Quality of Life to max out your financial future!

– This is important because it helps students understand what they’re doing in the game as they’re moving through time. They need to understand that this transition from a student to a worker is very different –

First Learning Points – Unplanned Expenses

When students start the game, one of their first goals is to balance their expected income and expenses so they can set their first Savings Goal.

We give students most information, but they need to take a guess at how much they will spend on “Unplanned” expenses each month.

This is a key learning point – the first month will be a complete guess, but after a couple of months, students will see that small “impulse” and “last-minute” purchases add up quickly to be a major part of their spending!

First Learning Points – Pay Yourself First

Every month students also need to set their Monthly Savings Goal.

The secret is that we don’t care what their expected expenses are – to get the most points, students need to save at least 10% of their expected income.

This is a key tenant of the “Pay Yourself First” savings strategy, a foundation of the budget game.

First Learning Points – Quality of Life

When students start the game, they are also asked to make several lifestyle choices:

• Where will they live? Crammed in with 5 roommates, or a nicer place with just 1 friend?
• What kind of TV/Internet package do they want? Just the basics, or a full-service package?
• How about their Cell Phone and data plan?
• And how will they be feeding themselves? Lots of cheap ramen and pasta, or lots of eating out?

These choices have a big impact on their Quality of Life – more expensive options give students a better Quality of Life and bonus points, but make it harder to hit their savings goals.

Discussion Point

Every student will have different events through the game – try launching a class discussion on what were the biggest expenses students faced each month. How frequently would students expect each expense to happen in the real world?

First Month

As students progress through the first few months, the game will pause and prompt students to complete short lessons.

We cover Credit and Debit, Savings Goals, Emergency Funds, and other essentials students need to succeed in the game in the first month, and more general finance concepts as the game goes on.

Life Events

At the end of each term, they get a life event. There’s two major types of led events: Fixed Expenses and Choices.

Fixed Expenses

Students don’t get any choice in it.

Either they need to choose to pay for something on their debit or credit card, either they need to choose to pay for it or skip it.

Choices

The choice cards have a big impact on their quality of life. Taking the more expensive option usually gives students a lot more points on the Quality of Life throughout the game.

Example: Students need to choose either they want or not to pay for house insurance. If they choose to don’t pay for it, there is a chance to have a break in every month, costing them several hundred dollars.

Discussion Point

Every choice in the budget game matters. The “Life Events” that pop up through the game are somewhat determined by the choices students make as they play.

What happened to you this month? What did you do before that had an impact on this? What would you have changed to make this outcome better? You can discuss this with students since they can give a recap of what worked well and what they would have changed in the past.

Ending the First Month

At the end of the first month, students get a summary of their savings and expenses, along with their progress to their savings goal.

Hitting a savings goal of 10% or more of their income earns big bonus points.

Teacher Tips

Make sure to play at least the first month of the game together as a class

End the first month of a recap – what were unexpected expenses? How did students cope? What will they do differently next month?

Assessments

Building assessments around the budget game is a matter of art. You will get the most out of your students if you ask them to provide “Monthly Summaries” as written document – specify what went right, wrong, and what they plan to do to fix it.

Be sure to also use the Assignments built into PFinLab — these have quizzes with automatically-graded quizzes you can use for more objective grading!

The Next Months…

Students will build up their Credit Score and Emergency Fund for the first part of the game, with lessons along the way.

Keep students “paced” by completing assignments and quizzes, rather than hour-long blocks of just the game itself.

Students will build up their Credit Score and Emergency Fund for the first part of the game, with lessons along the way.

Keep students “paced” by completing assignments and quizzes, rather than hour-long blocks of just the game itself.

The Rankings

The Budget Game also has a ranking page, showing student rankings by Overall Score, Net Worth, Credit Score, and Quality of Life.

Pay attention and give students shout-outs – even students at the bottom of the list!

Graduation

After playing as a part-time student for a semester, students “Graduate” from school and start their first full-time job.

They will need to pick a new place to live and other settings (as they no longer have roommates), and now get a consistent 40-hours per week salary at a higher pay grade.

Key Learning Point

The starting salary students get when starting their full-time job depends on how much they “studied” when a student. Students who “studied” often get a bigger paycheck with their full-time job!

Full-Time Mode Differences

• Bigger Bills – Students no longer have roommates, their bills all go up significantly
• Bigger Paychecks – Students have a pay raise and work a steady 40-hours a week
• Professional Development – Instead of studying, students can undertake “Professional Development” on the weekend (and raise their salary with enough of it)
• New Bills – New “Student Loan” and “Health Insurance” bills to pay every month

Key Learning Point

On the weekend, “Study” becomes “Professional Development” – as every student in the modern economy should understand the importance of lifetime learning. Conducting “Professional Development” frequently leads to a raise at their job!

Other Full-Time Mode Differences

Once students start their full-time job, they will be faced with even more choices and long-term impacts than before.

• Getting a pet? Expect to spend more at the grocery shop, and new vet bills pop up as Life Events… But also expect to boost your Quality of Life.
• More emphasis on household expenses, insurance, and general “Adulting”

Key Learning Point

As students complete 6, 12, 18+ months of the game, most of the healthy financial habits should become second nature.

After 12 months, how many students have a full 840 credit score? Launch a class discussion with both the students at the top and bottom of the class rankings to identify what went right and wrong, and discuss the importance of establishing healthy habits early!

If you have used a stock game in your class before, you know the drill – you choose your class’s custom rules and starting cash (usually around $100,000), your students sign in, and they use that cash to build their portfolio that they manage over the course of a semester.

This might make sense to a professional fund manager who has a certain amount of assets, but is a far cry from how personal investors build their wealth over time. PersonalFinanceLab’s newest enhancement turns this system on its head with our new Weekly Deposits – the biggest thing to happen to stock games since stocks!

How It Works

With Weekly Deposits, you would start off your class with a relatively small amount of starting cash – say $100, $1000, or even $10,000.

Then every Sunday evening, your students get extra cash deposited into their account – as the teacher, you choose exactly how much.

This completely transforms a passive “Fund Manager” stock game into a true Personal Finance exercise. Just like the real world, students regularly add money into their portfolio, which they need to continually re-invest and re-balance, rather than passively holding a few stocks they purchased on the first day of your class game.

This matches how a small investor really builds their portfolio – one transfer at a time!

Using Weekly Deposits In Class

Weekly Deposits opens up a whole new world for ways to use the PersonalFinanceLab stock game in classes. Here’s a few scenarios to consider for your next semester:

The Junior Investor

When we ask for student feedback, one of the biggest downsides of a “$100k stock game” is that it is more money than the average student can really conceptualize. For Weekly Deposits, you can create a “Micro-Investor, Regular Saver” game!

• Start students out with just $100 starting cash – putting a true limit on what they can invest
• Set a weekly deposit of $100, to mimic students saving an extra $100 out of every paycheck for the duration of your class.
• As your class stock game goes on, students will be able to afford different stocks, and need to rebalance their portfolio to adjust. Do they keep re-balancing to maintain diversification, or do they cash out all their Ford stock (around $8/share) to buy one share of Apple (around $120/share) after the first week?

The Career Saver

This scenario gives a bit more flexibility for students to build a diversified portfolio right off the bat.

• Start students with $10,000 in starting cash, with our normal 25% position limit rules (students need at least 4 different stocks to use all their starting cash)
• Deposit an additional $1000 cash each week. In the scenario for your students, this will be a “sped-up” monthly savings that they need to re-invest.
• In this scenario, students need to continually re-balance their portfolio to stay diversified as their cash goes up. Do they keep investing in the same stocks they started with, or build up a wide portfolio of many holdings?

Budget Game Combo

The new Weekly Deposits also adds a great dimension for classes also using our Budget Game. By leveraging our Assignments, you can automatically credit students’ Stock Game accounts after they complete specific actions in the Budget Game, like completing a certain number of months or completing specific lessons in the Learning Center.

Learn More About Our Budget Game

Learn More About Assignments and Rewards

What This Means For Rankings And Portfolios

In our back-end, we adjust the Weekly Deposits by incrementing up the student’s starting cash balance. For the rankings, it means that the “percentage returns” are not distorted by the weekly deposits. However, classes that might be using more advanced rankings, such as Sharpe Ratio and Alpha/Beta, will see some distortion.

How To Get A Weekly Deposit Stock Game For Your Class

If your school already has a PersonalFinanceLab site license, “Weekly Deposits” are a new rule you’ll see right after choosing your Starting Cash Balance for your next stock game.

If your school does not yet have a PersonalFinanceLab site license, use the form below to get a quote!

[contact-form-7 id=”17909″ title=”Pfinlab Order Form”]