The Budget Challenge Blog

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.

We built a better stock market game AND it is focused on student outcomes, not entertainment It is now mid-summer 2021 and this blog post is about how we designed and built not just a better stock market game, but the most innovative tool for teaching effective investing. We performed a complete tear-down and rebuild of the classic stock market game with the belief that we could correct its obvious issues and optimize the experience for helping students’ financial futures.

Robinhood and GameStop: young investors or young gamblers? It has been one of the biggest investing stories in 2021 and possibly the entire pandemic. It is now mid-March of 2021 and some time has passed to reflect upon what happened and more importantly, why?

This is the second post in the ‘Under the Hood’ series. Like the first post, this is also about credit card usage in the simulation. We’ll take a deeper look at the behavior of the credit card in the simulation, how it impacts the student experience and address some feedback we have received. This second post is written for our teachers who use Budget Challenge with their students and those who are thinking about starting.

This is the first post in a series called ‘Under the Hood’, where I explain the thinking behind some of the not-so-obvious design decisions that you experience in the simulation. In explaining these decisions, I also attempt to address some of the feedback we’ve received and propose alternate perspectives for users of the program to consider. This first post is for our students who play Budget Challenge. So, let’s go!