If you find yourself teaching a class remotely for the first time this Spring, never fear! PersonalFinanceLab.com has everything you need for a knock-out distance learning class, all in one place. Our engaging simulations, interactive games, built-in assessments, multi-media curriculum, customizable lesson plans, and teacher presentation and video library has everything you need to turn this semester into a smashing success.

If you’re using our resources for the first time, this guide will have everything you need to get off to a running start in less than 5 minutes!

Step 1: Set Up Your Games

PersonalFinanceLab centers our resources on our Stock Market and Budgeting Games. Both games are highly customizable, and will keep students fully engaged and focused on the class. The first step in having a successful online course is to set up these foundational activities – and our support team will be with you every step of the way!

You can use one game or the other, but using both is the best way to get the most engagement out of your class!

The Budget Game

In the Budget Game, students taken on the role of a college student with a part time job – they will need to manage their variable income, unexpected expenses, and tough decisions as they work to improve their Net Worth, Credit Score, and Quality of Life. Students progress through time (each “month” taking about 20 minutes), with each decision having long-lasting impacts on how the game plays out.

Teachers can control the types of life events that occur in-game, along with what bills students receive, how much they earn at their job, and much more. You can even give them “shocks” by increasing their rent or other bills mid-game! Students can also see their performance against other students in the class by Credit Score, Quality of Life, Net Worth, or their overall Game Score.

The Stock Game

Our real-time stock game brings investing education to a whole new level. Students buy and sell stocks, mutual funds, and bonds at real-time prices, and can track their performance with real-time class rankings. Students take notes with every trade to explain their rationale. Teachers can group their students together into Teams to build a shared portfolio for an excellent group project.

All research is built right in, with quotes, charts, analyst ratings, and much more put right at your student’s fingertips (along with plenty of help and tutorials to help them get moving!). There are tons of teacher reports showing all student activities, and lots of teacher help to show how to get investing conversations started in class.

Step 2: Pick Your Lesson Plans

Next up, you’ll take a stroll through our comprehensive, customizable lesson plan library. Each lesson plan overs a specific Personal Finance topic, like Credit or Investing.

We then break down 7-15 activities specifically optimized for distance learning: specific prompts for how students should approach their budget game or stock game, lessons from our mixed-media Curriculum Library, pre-built Google Slides and PowerPoint presentations that you can use for direct instruction, class discussion points you can use as prompts on your LMS, and more.

Each activity shows an approximate time for completion, pick and choose the activities – everything you need to give an awesome distance learning experience, all in one place!

Step 3: Add Curriculum and Assessments

Now that your games are set up and you’ve chosen the lesson plans you want to use, set up “Assignments” for your class on PersonalFinanceLab.com. Assignments are list of tasks and lessons you assign to your students – our curriculum library has over 300 lessons aligned to state and national standards that you can integrate with your class with a click of a button.

If you started with the Lesson Plans, it will include several recommended lessons from our curriculum library for each topic, but feel free to mix and match to suit your class.

We use mixed media for our lessons, with a combination of articles, videos, infographics, and interactive activities to bring everything together. Every lesson ends with a short, 3-5 question Pop Quiz Assessment – you can choose whether students can re-take the assessment for a higher score, or if you want to save their first attempt to your Grade Book.

Each Assignment will have a start date and a due date. When your students log into PersonalFinanceLab to check their portfolio in the Stock Game or make more progress in the Budget Game, their Assignment will also appear on the page, listing the lessons they are expected to complete and a countdown for when it is due.

Step 4: Students Compete And Learn!

Now you’re home free! The live rankings from both the Budget Game and Stock Game help keep students engaged, while your Assignments keep students on-task for the course learning objectives. You can use the discussion prompts to encourage further engagement, and review student performance on each Assessment to identify any problem areas.

To get started, you’ll need to order accounts for your class. We cut our normal price of $15 per student down to $5 per student to help out schools forced to go “Remote” for the remainder of the Spring 2020 session – you can either buy accounts directly or request we invoice your school.

Create A Trial Student Account!

Don’t want to schedule a demo? Click Here to create a demo account and preview the platform as a student.

Just in time for March, the Personal Finance Lab team is excited to announce a massive new update for our budgeting game!

Our latest update includes some huge enhancements for your class, including:

• An overhaul to the Quality of Life scores, making the point scoring system much easier to understand.
• A new Overall Game Score, synthesizing student’s Credit Scores, Quality of Life, and general savings habits into one metric.
• A new “Budget Builder” activity each month, where students compare their upcoming income, estimate their expenses, and set savings goals for the month.
• A new “Budget Summary” at the end of each month, showing students how well they stuck to their savings goals (and awards bonus points!)
• New integrated Tutorials and Lessons that occur regularly throughout the game highlighting key budgeting skills

Quality of Life Update

The key trade-off in our budgeting game (and real life) is the decision to Save or Spend. We capture this in our Quality of Life score, where students can increase their Quality of Life by renting nicer apartments, having better cell phone/internet plans, or buying luxury goods. Our original feedback was that many students were having a hard time understanding this score, so our new update makes things pretty simple:

They will get Quality of Life points for spending and purchases beyond the “Bare Minimum”, plus bonus points for Socializing, Studying, or taking care of their Household Chores.

Points From Spending

Every month, students make dozens of decisions in the game. But one of the biggest is where live. We give students 3 options when they first join:

In the example above, students who choose the $270 option would earn 0 Quality of Life points, since they are choosing the bare minimum to survive. Students choosing the middle option would earn 80 points each month (350 – 270 = 80), while students choosing the most luxurious option would earn 212 points.

Students have the option to move apartments or change their cell phone/TV plans any time (for a fee), so if they find they can’t quite afford the luxuries, they can scale down (and lose some Quality of Life). The same point system applies for all the other spending choices students face throughout the game – points are earned for luxuries above the bare minimum.

Points from Weekend Choices

Every weekend, students choose how to spend their time – Working to earn more money, Socializing with friends, taking care of Household chores, or Studying.

We now also award 50 Quality of Life points every time they Socialize, and 25 points every time they take care of their Household or Study.

New Game Score

There’s a brand-new Game Score we added to the top of the Budget Game:

The Game Score is a metric on how well students are following Personal Finance best practices. Students maximize their Game Score by making wise personal finance decisions (not just trying to save every penny).

The new Game Score combines the student’s Quality of Life Score, Credit Score, and how well they are reaching their savings goals.

• Students earn 1 Game Score point for every Quality of Life point.
• Students earn 5 Game Score points for every Credit Score point.
• Students earn 1000 Game Score points by funding their Emergency Fund – 1000 points when they put $500 in their savings account, and another 1000 points when they save up a full $1000.
• Plus additional Game Score points for hitting monthly savings objectives.

We’ve balanced the Game Score to encourage students to build up their Emergency Fund quickly, always save at least 10% of their income, responsibly use their credit card, but also take care to invest in their Quality of Life (rather than simply always choose the cheapest options for every choice).

New Budget Builder

At the start of every month, students will now need to complete their Budget Builder – this will ask students to find their expected income for the month, estimate their expected expenses, and set a Savings Goal.

Estimating Income

First, students will see how many hours they are scheduled to work for this month. They need to sum up what they expect as their paychecks, and we give them an estimate for how many “Tips” they will receive, and deduct their income tax. We also show students how much they earned last month, so they can plan ahead if they expect to earn more or less.

Estimating Expenses

Next, students see their expenses for the upcoming month – plus any unpaid bills and credit card balance they are carrying over from last month. Students need to make a guess as to how much they will spend in “Unexpected Expenses”. The first month of the game this will be a blind guess, but we also show students what they spent last month. This gives students a great way to learn how to estimate their expenses based on their spending history.

Setting Savings Goals

Last, we show students what they found their income and expenses, and ask them to set a Savings Goal for the month. We highly encourage to students to set a Savings Goal of 10% of their income, but it is more important to set a goal they can actually achieve than one they cannot. On the right side of the page, we give them a gauge on the quality of their goal (with 10% being “Great”), and a difficulty level (depending on their expected surplus or shortfall) – giving students a perfect benchmark to temper their spending for the month ahead.

End of the Month

At the end of each month, we also now prompt students with a Monthly Summary, showing how well they hit their savings goals.

• Students with a 10% or higher savings goal that hit it will earn an extra 600 Bonus Points to their Game Score.
• Students with a 5% or higher savings goal that hit it will earn an extra 300 Bonus Points to their Game Score
• Students with very low goals, or who miss their goals, don’t earn any bonus points.

Integrated Lessons and Tutorials

When students start the game, the calendar will look a bit different, with some new Green calendar days:

On these days students will be prompted with a mini-lesson both to illustrate an important Personal Finance concept, and to help them to be successful in the Budgeting Game.

Students need to read the short lesson and complete a Challenge Question to continue. Each mini-lesson takes between 2 and 5 minutes to complete.

Some of the first lessons include:

• The difference between their Debit Card and Credit Card
• The importance of an Emergency Fund
• How their Credit Card charges interest and fees
• How to prioritize their bills if they are short on cash

Students will get the most tutorials right at the start of the game, but a few more appear throughout the session (filing taxes, budgeting for the holidays, and other special events).

We hope your class gets as excited as we are to dive in and get budgeting!

As you may well be aware, we have a Budgeting game which can be used as both a supplemental and integrated resource. The philosophy of the Budgeting game is for the students to learn by doing. The focus of the game is to keep things simple and for the student to learn the fundamentals of money management. This resource is not here to replace you, but merely to become a teaching tool that you can use to introduce or consolidate a topic, so the basics can be understood, while theory and terminology can be scaffolded onto initial understanding.

Here is a QuickStart lesson that I like to use with my classes that you can use with your classes to introduce some of the fundamentals of money with our Budgeting Game. Each lesson will require the player to play at least one “virtual month” in the game which will take approximately 20 mins. Further time can be taken to do research and answer questions. Differentiation can be by outcome .

Lesson: Comparison Shopping

When shopping it is really important to understand that we do have choices. But buying objectives should be noted. With opportunity cost, we are looking at the cost of giving one thing up for another. With comparison shopping, it is the process of finding and then looking at the choices available to us.

Quite often we assume that price is the only thing that we should consider when comparing products. However, along with the initial price saving, will quality actually be a factor? Are the needs we have defined met by that choice? Do you get what you pay for?

It is always important to understand why you are buying that product and how you intend to use it. There are various ways to compare products, including price comparison websites, reviews of products and the part where you actually try things for yourself and make a decision.

This concept follows on nicely from opportunity cost where the student will want something, but will have to forgo other options.

Activity

Within the Budgeting game, students will have many choices to make.
For one round of the Budgeting game, students should find out how much they have paid for their internet, cell phone and groceries. They should then research alternative plans available to them and produce a comparison list. For the internet and cell phone, they could include the price, plan, coverage etc. For the groceries, they should create a list of groceries that they would buy for a week and then compare prices between 3 supermarkets, remembering to look at the price per unit/weight/volume. Encourage the students to discuss the variation in prices they have found and how they can use this method to reach saving targets.

I hope you enjoy teaching this lesson as much as I do.

Teachers, 2020 is here, marking a fresh new start, so there isn’t any better time to challenge your students to change their spending habits and set them up for financial independence! Here’s a great activity for your class that uses our Budget Game to understand how to build an emergency fund!

Goal:

The goal of this activity is to get students to save 10% of all the money they receive so that they can have an emergency fund.

The Rules:

Implement a rule for the Budget Game that students must save 10 cents for every dollar of income received. Also, implement the rule that for any “Event Card” they receive they need to transfer money from their checking account into their savings account. By transferring the money, students will automatically gain more points in the game. 

Philosophy: 

The philosophy of the Budget Game is for the students to learn by doing. The focus of the game is to help students learn the fundamentals of money management. This resource is not here to replace you, but merely to become a teaching tool that you can use to introduce or consolidate a topic so that the basics can be understood. The budgeting game can, therefore, be used as both a supplemental and integrated resource!

To find more lesson plans and in class activities, click here!

Very few students will ever care to know how to graph a parabola, but everyone will need to know how to do their taxes. Don’t require trigonometry but require basic tax preparation.

Lindsey, 41, mixed race mother of five in Oregon suburb

Personal Finance Lab’s parent organization turns 30 this year, and we have been involved in the changing landscape of k-12 education in the United States every step of the way. I have been working on our curriculum development over the last 5 years, and during that time I’ve been travelling around the country speaking at regional education conferences, holding webinars and focus groups with teachers, diving into discussions with parents, and trying to help make sure every student in the United States had access to the basic financial literacy skills they will need after graduation.

What we do here at PersonalFinanceLab is to bring the best of what we’ve learned from the last 75 years of experiments in education reform across the country, and apply it to how we teach financial concepts in schools. Much of this comes back to an ever-evolving balance between what are known as the STEM disciplines, CTE programs, and “Life Adjustment” schools. How these three areas interact is essential to understanding how Personal Finance and Economic topics appear in the classroom.

A History Lesson

Before getting into the play between the areas of emphasis, let’s take a step back and see how we got to where we are today.

Post-Depression Education Reform

“…60 per cent of those in secondary school were neglected. The college preparatory curriculum was too remotely related to the lives they were living and were going to live; students didn’t plan to become skilled in any particular trade because the jobs open to them did not demand the kind of training schools could offer”

Carl Franzen, 1951

After World War II, high school enrollment across the United States started to surge. This is important – in 1930, high school enrollment was less than 50% of all 14-17 year olds. By 1950, it soared to over 70%.

This caused a full-blow existential crisis in schools around the country: Before 1950, most students would leave high school as soon as they could find a job – graduates who stayed through to the end were generally being groomed to continue on to college or enter a specific trade. As high school enrollment spiked, more and more students might not be on either of those paths: not planning on going to college, but also not planning to embark on a specific trade.

This caused a huge debate on education policy across the country – if more and more students were expected to graduate high school, what did society expect them to actually learn while they were there?

Life Adjustment Education

The answer was provided largely by market demand. Parents of this first spike of high school graduates themselves grew up during the Great Depression, and wanted their children to grow up knowing how to face the “Real World”. The concept of “Life Adjustment Education” developed and spread quickly from about 1947 through 1956 – the idea being that schools did not necessarily need to teach “more” subjects, but to put them through the lens of preparing students after graduation. Math classes should include lessons on taxes, English classes should include writing for business, science classes should focus on careers available in each field.

This was extremely popular among parents, who saw it as a natural “3rd path” between the College Prep and CTE curriculum, but generally speaking there was no “revolution”. Classes were still taught primarily through lecture, with fairly soft directives taken up by more ambitious teachers.

Sputnik and the STEM Crisis

The concept of Life Adjustment Education came to a screeching halt in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik. The country was gripped in panic – the “Missile Gap” was still a few years away, but the “Engineering Gap” was staring down directly from the heavens. It became a top national priority to start producing more engineers and technical specialists, as quickly as possible.

At the time, these fields broadly consisted of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics. The National Science Foundation pumped billions of dollars into curriculum development, teacher training, film reels (for self-taught classes while new teachers were being recruited and trained) and new ways of teaching.

The Rise of the Lab

This is where the story gets interesting – the National Science Foundation push, and the funding that followed, is the reason why every high school has a biology and chemistry lab today. The real revolution in education came about explicitly because there were a lack of qualified teachers at the time – necessity was the mother of invention. Since there was no way to get fully qualified science instructors in every classroom on the turn of a dime, a radical new method of teaching was applied – the Experiential Classroom.

The National Science Foundation’s curriculum included libraries of exercises that could be conducted in the newly-built Labs – exercises that were guided by teacher input, but relied on students working by themselves or in groups to execute a set of instructions in a dedicated lab environment. At the time, teachers simply did not have the expertise to lecture about chemistry for an hour per day, and the experiential component was to give them a break by letting students “learn by doing”.

It is hard to undersell how well this new approach worked – STEM graduates flooded universities in the years afterwards. The engineers behind the Apollo moon landings were the first generation to graduate high school from these new Labs, and American universities were well-fed with students for STEM fields for decades afterwards.

Parents were also overwhelmingly supportive – they loved seeing the physical presence of the Labs at the schools, and could tangibly identify what their kids were learning, and why. The high school science teacher even became famous in their communities (if you’ve seen Stranger Things on Netflix, you’ll notice only one teacher pops up with a speaking roll).

STEM Today

Despite news stories that you may have seen arguing otherwise, the STEM crisis has largely abated. That is not to say we don’t need STEM – but that this is a problem we’ve been throwing money at for decades, and generally seems to be under control. There are still STEM vacancies – but today we have the graduates to fill them.

So this brings is back to where we left off back in 1956 – how do we get back on track for preparing students for life after school? What do we want students to know when they graduate high school, and how do we teach them?

Academics First, But Not Alone

The American Federation of Teachers commissioned a study to answer exactly this question a couple years ago, and the answers aren’t surprising. More than half of parents agree that pure academics should definitely be at the top of the agenda in high schoool (53%) compared to just 2 percent saying high school’s main focus should be preparing students for work.

However, diving a layer deeper shows a very different story. 75% of all adults say that high schools have at least some responsibility to prepare students both academically and to teach job skills. When asked about elective classes, more parents wanted their students to take a job skills or personal finance class than any advanced mathematics (or arts and music).

This is mirrored in nation-wide trends: 20 states now require some form of financial literacy to be taught in high schools (usually combined with some other subject) – as a society, we want our students to be better prepared for life after graduation, but we don’t want to sacrifice other academics to do it.

Enter The Finance Lab

The biggest success story of the STEM push of the 1950’s and 1960’s was the High School Lab, and kick-starting the entire experiential education revolution.

Thanks to advances in technology over the last 10 years, Financial Literacy is now the prime candidate for new Labs across the country – a dedicated place in the school focusing on learning about money, economics, budgeting, insurance, and everything in between. New simulations (like the ones we pioneer here at PersonalFinanceLab.com) turn these formerly dry topics into the most exciting place at the school, with interactive simulations, white-knuckle trading competitions, streaming market data, and life-inspired budgeting games taking center stage. This simply wasn’t possible 15 years ago, but the experimental approach has quickly proven to be the “missing piece of the puzzle” when tackling financial topics all over the country.

Math departments love labs because of a rising trend of teaching financial math classes (some states even include Personal Finance and Economics as part of their Math standards). CTE departments love them because it is the natural place to hold accounting, entrepreneurship, and business classes (and is a great way to grab student attention!). Social studies departments love them because it breaks off the lecture series and is an awesome way to introduce economic and financial topics. Teachers love them because it turns their classroom into the coolest room at the school, and parents love them for the same reason they liked the biology and chemistry labs – they have a clear, tangible way to see that their kids are learning valuable life skills in an environment explicitly designed for that purpose.

Building a Lab is usually the one thing that each of the different departments can usually agree on. Hundreds of new labs are being built across the country every year (particularly in states that have a mandate to teach financial topics). If your school doesn’t have one already, ask your administration:

We have a biology lab. We have a chemistry lab. Why not a Personal Finance or Business Lab?

Kevin Smith is the director of Curriculum Development for PersonalFinanceLab.com. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Concordia University in Montreal, and is a candidate for a Master’s of Public Administration from the Illinois Institute of Technology.