Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

The video games I grew up with involved dodging bullets, lasers, ninjas, and occasionally Mike Tyson. In Spent, the object is to avoid becoming homeless.

Spent is an outreach project from Urban Ministries of Durham, a charity based in Durham, North Carolina dedicated toward giving basic essentials to the poor and homeless. The game paints a grim picture of life for people who can barely keep a place to live. The object is to make it 30 days without running out of money. At the start of the game, you’re down to your last $1,000, and you need to find a job and an apartment. A bad economy means slim pickings for both. Cheaper rent means living farther away from work, which increases both your fuel costs as well as the wear and tear on your car.

Like a computerized embodiment of Murphy’s Law, Spent confronts you with one misfortune after another. To win, you have to make a series of hard choices that have no apparent right answer. For example, you wake up one morning to find that someone has siphoned all the gas from your car. Do you take three buses (and three hours) to show up for work late? Or just call in sick and miss out on a day’s wages? (Your low-level temp job doesn’t give paid sick days.) What do you do when your kid is about to fail his math course unless he gets help? Paying $50 for a tutor means not being able to fix your car, which is falling to pieces because of your marathon commute to work every day. I played three rounds of Spent and successfully made it to the end of the month twice. After completing a winning round with $98 left to my name, the game reminded me, “And your rent’s due again. What are you going to do next month?”

I feel fortunate that I’ve never been in such dire straits as those presented in Spent. The game does a good job of giving a sense of the desperation felt by people who live on the fringes. Spent would be a good addition to an economics or social studies class to illustrate the effects of a recession, or to show how some of our nation’s homeless got that way.

Spent

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Try to erase North Carolina’s defecit with the Balance the Budget Challenge

Try to balance the state budget with the Backseat Budgeter

BY BILL FERRIS

Here in North Carolina, we’re coping with a budget shortfall. Valuable programs are facing cuts, and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. I don’t envy Governor Bev Perdue or anyone else making these decisions, as pretty much any decision they make will make life worse for a lot of people. You can help convey the stakes of the situation to your students with the Balance the Budget Challenge, a game from the North Carolina governor’s office that lets us common folk try to balance a budget with a $2.4 billion deficit.

The Balance the Budget Challenge presents you with dozens of options that can cut the state budget. Should you raise tuition to universities or community colleges? Release a few thousand prisoners from jail? Or perhaps you’d care to eliminate all school-nurse jobs in the state? You can also take measures that will promote long-term growth but raise the deficit in the short term — for example, you could increase financial incentives for business to move to North Carolina. When you’ve finished the challenge, simply press a button to submit your budget proposal to the Governor.

What struck me the most about the BTBC was the sheer number of cuts you need to make — after I cut what seemed like a massive amount of programs, I found I still had a few hundred million left to go. Lest you start on a slash-and-burn campaign in the hopes of “winning” the budget, the game also presents you with the consequences of your decisions — that is, you get to see an exact tally of how many people you just sent to the unemployment line.

My only complaint about BTBC was that it asks you to make cuts to education before any other category. Obviously some category had to be listed first, but I nearly gutted the public education budget altogether before I realized I had six more pages of possible cuts to consider. I have no idea if anyone in power actually reads these proposals, but front-loading the game with cuts to school spending potentially sends a message that North Carolina citizens see educational spending as expendable.

That complaint aside, I recommend the Balance the Budget Challenge as a fun, if sobering look at how a state budget operates. It does a good job of teaching about both fiscal responsibility and the human consequences of financial decisions.

Balance the Budget Challenge

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Try to balance the state budget with the Backseat Budgeter

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

As much as I love maps, they occasionally frustrate me. By their very nature –- distorting a spherical earth to appear on a two-dimensional surface -– maps can represent the world inaccurately and lead to misunderstandings. Consider the Greenland problem in the Mercator projection. When something looks larger or smaller, we easily jump to conclusions about its importance.

But why not use distortion as a teaching tool? Distorting the world in the right ways can give us new insights, and that’s exactly what the Our Changing World map from FedEx does. Choose a topic and watch the size of each country morph to reflect the data. Certain parts of the world will expand or shrink depending on the value of their exports or their number of computer users, for example. Clicking below the map will bring up more detail about how the topic is changing the world. You can even compare two maps side-by-side (click “explore” in the upper right).

You may be skeptical about a resource produced by a corporation, but this map is truly more informational than commercial. There are no advertisements other than a small FedEx logo and occasional mention of the company’s name in the explanations.

This map is a fantastic way to show data visually, but it also makes a great jumping-off point to discuss maps’ power to represent information and influence our perceptions. Students could even research a topic and create their own distorted maps, though it’s probably best for them to focus on one region of the world.

Our Changing World

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Worldmapper combines geography and social science

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Get real-time global statistics Worldometers

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Following the money is almost always easier said than done. A big push of the federal stimulus package was to prop up school districts beset by fiscal difficulties in the economic downturn, to the tune of at least $62 billion. But where did the money go?

EdMoney Schools Database is designed to track that money flow, and it is pretty interesting to see the breakdown. The site has an interactive map for each state, or you can type in geographic locations to see where the money is going. I checked out my state of Massachusetts, and used EdMoney to track the $1.5 billion awarded to it under the stimulus plan. Of that, only about $590 million has been spent. I then went even deeper, digging into my own school district’s allocation of funds (we’ve spent about 90 percent of what we were awarded by the state, it seems). Interestingly, when you get to this level in the database, it allows you to compare your own district with other districts of comparable size. The site also shows various news stories related to the stimulus in education and visitors can register and submit stories of how the federal funds have helped (or hindered) schools.

The site is funded in part by a grant from the Gates Foundation, and its data and analysis comes from a group called the Education Writing Association, which seeks to improve education reporting to the general public. The site says, “We will code stories and tips by state, school district, and schools to help reporters and their communities understand how these funds are being spent.”

EdMoney Schools Database

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Mo’ money? Find out where federal stimulus money for education is going

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

An economics lesson often involves charts and graphs to demonstrate data, but it also helps to show the people, companies, and governments that the data represents. Reffonomics is full of the kind of visual lessons that good economics teaching requires.

Developed by an accomplished educator named Steven Reff, the site features interactive lessons that work like slide shows, advancing with a click of the mouse. The lessons are colorful, visual, and often repeat key concepts so students know what’s important. The topics range from the basic “What is Economics?” to advanced concepts that would fit in an AP Microeconomics or Macroeconomics course. In fact, due to Mr. Reff’s experience as an AP consultant, many of the lessons align with AP standards.

These lessons are great for illustrating topics that might otherwise be a challenge for students to understand. You can also share links to the lessons so students can watch on their own.

Reffonomics

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Debt Ski: Navigate the sea of personal finance

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Everyone would agree that it’s important to learn about personal finance, yet many kids grow up without the skills to manage their money. This is probably because the topic was never put in the context of a pig riding a jet ski. Play Debt Ski with your students and they should see things more clearly.

The game dresses basic economic concepts in a cartoonish summer look. You have to steer the pig through an obstacle course, helping him grab as many coins (income) as possible. Along the way you also need to pick up necessities while avoiding too many luxuries (though they make your pig happy). At the end of the course your income and expenses are tallied, leaving you with savings or debt. You can then buy upgrades to your ski, but beware the pitfalls of credit cards! This is one of the most teachable aspects of the game, as there are credit limits, minimum payments, and interest on unpaid debt.

Pass all eight levels and you’ll get a final score based on the savings, debt, and happiness points you’ve accumulated. There’s no end to the score you can earn, which will encourage healthy competition among students. After playing Debt Ski, they can check out the game’s parent site, InDebtEd, which is designed to help college students navigate the jungle of student expenses. High school students will be there soon, so they might as well start learning personal finance now.

Debt Ski

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Karma Tycoon turns philanthropy into a game

Students can manage their money at Mint.com

The Centsables fight against financial irresponsibility

YouAreHere teaches kids to be smart consumers

BY BILL FERRIS

A game called Karma Tycoon causes a little cognitive dissonance for me — accumulating good karma seems contrary to to the word tycoon, which I associate with greed. Nevertheless, there are worse qualities than having a competitive desire to make a difference in society.

I’ve never played games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but I’ll assume Karma Tycoon is based on the same principles — you acquire good karma by building and maintaining homeless shelters, performing arts centers, and other facilities designed to make a positive impact in a community. You can apply for grants and loans to bankroll your philanthropy, and the more people you help, the better your karma score.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Let’s face it, unhealthy food options and a general lack of nutritional awareness have made childhood obesity a big issue in this country. In an effort to tackle the problem head-on, First Lady Michelle Obama has launched the aptly named Let’s Move. Part informational and part networking building, the site offers a wealth of nutrition and health information while trying to lay the foundation for a network of health-conscious citizens to work together to fight childhood obesity.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Understanding how to budget your resources and not spend more that you take in can help children create a foundation for success later in life. Unfortunately, the subject often seems boring and intangible for students — graphs of production curves, widgets, butter versus guns, the law of diminishing returns…I remember them all from my economics class, but at the time, they seemed to have no relevance to my personal situation.

But here we have The Centsables, an interactive training tool for explaining and teaching students about economic and monetary responsibility. The premise revolves around a group of financial superheroes, The Centsables, who explain healthy economic principles in a campy comic-book format that is engaging and fun for young students. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

YouAreHere, a site from the Federal Trade Commission, teaches 5th through 8th graders about being smart consumers. Your students will get to hang out at a virtual mall, learning lessons about stuff like scams, supply and demand, competition, identity theft, and misleading advertising in each store.

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BY BILL FERRIS

America runs on electricity. And coal, and wind power, and hydroelectric, and Dunkin Donuts. Powering a Nation, a multimedia project from the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication, looks at the cost of our current energy situation, the possible alternatives, as well as the consequences of making the sorts of wholesale changes that green energy would bring.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Try your hand at balancing a state budget with the Colorado Backseat Budgeter, an online application from the Bighorn Leadership Development Program at Colorado State University. The Backseat Budgeter lets you decide how much to spend on health care, roads, education, social services and so forth, while raising or lowering tax rates to make up for budget shortfalls. In keeping with these hard economic times, the Backseat Budgeter starts you approximately $800 million in the hole.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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As a reminder that things can always get worse, the Library of Congress has released several photos from the Great Depression on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The LOC has posted some of the most frequently requested photos from their collection as free digital images in their FSA/OWI Favorites set. Like other LOC photo collections on Flickr, you and your class can tag and comment to your heart’s content.

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I’m totally over this financial crisis business. People everywhere are homeless and jobless. Also, there are only so many ways to write an article without resorting to the overdone, “In today’s down economy, blah blah blah…” Nevertheless, it’s an issue that affects every one of us, which means that economic and financial education has never been been more important.

To help your students ease into the world of managing their own money, tell them about Mint.com. It’s a free site that helps users create a budget, track bank accounts, watch spending habits, and monitor investments. Mint will offer helpful suggestions on how to get out of debt or buy an affordable car.

Instilling good financial sense into your students now can help them make sound financial decisions in the years ahead. Mint.com can help them do exactly that. -BILL FERRIS

Mint.com

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Teach financial responsibility with Saving Our Futures

Get some game in the Stock Market (I immediately feel less cool after saying that)