Keep Your Students Engaged With A Year Long Stock Game!
If you’ve already used HowTheMarketWorks with your class, you know it can be one of the most fun and engaging part of the year for your students. However, just because your students have finished their unit on personal finance or investment doesn’t mean they can’t keep practicing!
We have been running investment challenges with schools for over 20 years, so here are some tips and tricks to running year long challenges for your class, your grade, or even your whole school! Setting up a year-long challenge is a great way to increase student engagement and make sure your lessons really stick!
Start Early!
It is never too early to set up your stock game! Even if your class challenge is still running, getting your Year Long Challenge started can be a great way to re-engage some of the students who might have fallen behind the class rankings early. Your students can continue to use the same username and password they used for your first class contest, and can easily switch between any other contests they have joined on most pages across the site.
When you register your new contest, you’ll get a link to send your students (just like the first time), if they click this link when logged in, they will join your new contest automatically. They can also find it by searching on the “Join Contests” page.
Click Here to set up your year long stock game!
Invite Lots Of Students!
If you are holding a year-long stock game, try to get other classes involved! The optional contests are a fun way to foster some healthy competition between classrooms, and work well in keeping your own students engaged in the long term. The more students you have join, the more likely the ones who didn’t at first will start to join their friends!
Use Assignments To Encourage Participation!
Assignments are more than just keeping track of your students, they can be a great way to help students who did not participate in your first class challenge to get to know how to use the site and do research (by requiring new students to watch our videos), and you can continue to boost participating by setting assignments to make 5 or 10 trades per week, offering bonus points to students who take part.
You can create unlimited assignments for each contest, so feel free to add a new “Place 5 trades” or “Make 3 limit orders” every week, and just remove the old assignments after the week is over!
Give Incentives!
Prizes and incentives are always a great way to encourage participation! We have two great ways you can encourage students on-site: you can give away one of our T-Shirts, or even just offer certificates to the winners to help!
You can find our certificate template here, or browse our shop for great stuff to give away on our Shop page!
No Time For A Year-Long Challenge? Mention Our Prized Contests!
We have at least one (and up to 6!) stock games with prizes every month, we gave away over $1,000 to students across the country who finished in the top 5 from our last contest! Our prized contests are usually fairly short – one month to one week – but because there is a new one every month, it can keep students engaged by never being too far behind everyone else!
You can see the details on the next upcoming contest here!
