Feature Highlight – Stock Game Teams!

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