Then we’ll use the next column to look up the current price of each person’s stock. Note that we’ll have to use some trickery to get the historical price because this google function returns a 2×2 array (thanks randomly searching and finding stackexchange). We’ll use the googlefinance formula, =GoogleFinance(ticker, attribute, date). I think the Stock Market Game would be better if supplemented with a lesson on exactly what a share of ownership in a corporation means (see What Makes a Good Business?). While I’m not sure I really learned that much from that experience of watching some random number fluctuate around, maybe it did plant some subconscious seed of interest as I ended up pursuing a career in finance. Basically, everyone picked one stock, and we occasionally checked to see who was doing the “best” based on price appreciation.
I was in 7th grade when I was first exposed to the Stock Market Game.
That makes perfect sense to us – a little less trigonometry and a little more compound interest is probably more useful in the long run. There seems to be a recent push to teach personal finance concepts in high school.