The Budget Challenge Blog

Rhiannon Miller, a teacher in South Park, Pennsylvania, has used Budget Challenge for the past four years. Read how she rewards her highest performing students.

Laura Abel, an accounting teacher in Kingwood, TX, has taught Budget Challenge in her classroom since 2015. We reached out to her to gain insight into how Budget Challenge is used to teach Personal Finance in her class. Here’s what she had to say.

We've made a few updates to Teacher Home to make managing quizzes even easier.

We reached out to a longtime Budget Challenge user, Betsy Nilsen, to get her thoughts on using Budget Challenge to teach Personal Finance at Cape Elizabeth High School.

At Budget Challenge, we pride ourselves on listening to teacher and student feedback and improving our program each year. This year is no different, so here's a quick overview of what we have in store for the 2023-24 school year.

Cindy Quaid is the Business & Technology Department Chair and the Future Business Leaders of America Adviser at Santa Maria High School in Santa Maria CA. This is her 30th year teaching at her high school alma mater. She is a long-time user of Budget Challenge.

Over the past few years, we have added significantly more curriculum content and flexibility for our teachers. One of the most significant areas of feedback we receive is extending Budget Challenge to fill a semester. Since we published the textbook, we've decided to allow our schedule to be expandable so that teachers can cover all of the content.

The Budget Challenge Engagement Score is a valuable measure of a student’s positive participation in the simulation. Students now can easily see their engagement on their Student Homepage immediately upon login.

Credit unions have a mission to serve their community's financial needs. Schools have a mission to create financially capable young adults. As First Area Credit Union begins its fourth year of Budget Challenge sponsorship, COO Lynn McCoy and Swan Valley Michigan High School teacher David Dawson share how they are transforming lives through their joint efforts. Read about it in this week's blog post.

In this “Under the Hood” post, we will look at the trophies and the design thinking behind them. Before Budget Challenge had trophies, we sometimes received feedback indicating that students and teachers were uncertain about what to focus on or prioritize. While this might be a common sentiment in the adult world of personal finance, it was a clear sign that there was an opportunity to improve the simulation. The question was how best to focus on the essential personal finance behaviors in the simulation. As it sometimes is in life, one needs to zoom out first to improve focus.