How to get ahead in life: York students learn about investing, budgeting with stocks game

Aaron Walters, like many teens, didn’t know much about the stock market.

“It always seemed way too grand in scope for me to understand,” said Walters, 17, of Shrewsbury.

But that’s changing, thanks to the 10-week Stock Market Challenge, an online platform created by the nonprofit Pennsylvania Council on Financial Literacy (PennCFL).

Four weeks into the program, Walters has already learned a lot. As part of the game, he selected five stocks, invested $100,000 in hypothetical money, and now he’s tracking — and trying to understand — the ups and downs of the stock market.

His strategy, encouraged by his teacher, Steven Wiles, at Susquehannock High School, included selecting five stocks in different industries that are part of his daily life.

“My dad works for a defense contractor, so I chose Lockheed Martin, and I chose AT&T because that’s what my cell phone service is on. I own an Intel computer, so I bought Intel stock,” said Walters.

His choices included two stocks he admits were “wild cards.”

“I’ve heard that Tesla stock is very volatile — that was kind of a wild card. It’s been up as high as 4%, but right now it’s down 5.27%, so it just bounces a bunch. And I bought Fox News because they had just crashed when we started the game, and I thought it would probably go up. That hasn’t paid out really well for me, because they’ve crashed yet again.”

Overall, he’s down 1.43% on his virtual investment of $100,000 — “not bad,” he said.

Walters is also beginning to understand what’s causing those ups and downs.

“World events can really impact stock prices,” he said. “There was recently a big drag on EV purchasing, so companies like Tesla have gone down. But Lockheed Martin shot up because of Israel, and the need for defense equipment. Intel might be doing some stuff with AI, because I expected them to be really stable, but they’ve gone up 4%, so they’ve turned out to be a really big player for me.”

How to get ahead in life

The game serves as a good introduction to the economics unit of Wiles’ U.S. government and economics class, composed of seniors like Walters, on the brink of graduating this spring.

“The ultimate goal is to expose them to how to get ahead in life — how to use money to make money and get an understanding of how your 401(k) is tied to stocks,” Wiles said.

He admits most of his students aren’t thinking about their 401(k)s quite yet, but that’s the point.

“The earlier they hear about this, the better,” said Wiles. “There’s an issue in this country — when people get to retirement age, they don’t have the money to retire. I’m trying to set them up for success.”

It’s part of a bigger educational movement to help students transition into being successful adults.

“There’s a big push in education today to try to make connections to the real world as much as possible. I think it’s crucial in today’s world,” said Wiles, 56, a teacher of 29 years.

While PennCFL’s games are free for all school districts’ use, teachers and organizers say they provide invaluable life lessons.

“If we can teach them to earn and invest wisely, instead of having their money sitting in savings, it can grow and work for them. It can not only change their lives, but generations to come,” said Eric Attinger, PennCFL spokesman.

Yet, the game aspect of the Stock Market Challenge speaks to today’s teens.

PennCFL ranks students’ scores and updates them weekly. Another one of Wiles’ students is currently ranked second — with a virtual stock market portfolio of $110,000 —among 408 York County students representing 16 York County school districts. Students can win Amazon gift cards, sponsored by PeoplesBank, in countywide and statewide competition.

The budget game

Across York County, another 366 students are playing a second PennCFL program, the Personal Budgeting Game, including students in Tori Martinez’s flex time study period at York City’s William Penn Senior High School.

“The budget game is really like the game of life — they are paying bills, how you’d start off as a young person by paying rent, paying taxes,” said Martinez.

The game board is set up like a calendar, and students roll virtual dice when bills are due.

“Every once in a while, they’ll roll the dice and get a flat tire, or their refrigerator will die,” Attinger said. “Because every day, we do roll the dice, and nobody plans for a flat tire, but it happens.”

Last year, one of Martinez’s students won the budget game among all York County students. She said her students thrive on competition.

“I think the idea of the budget game, the gamification of it, really engages students,” said Martinez, whose flex class includes a mix of juniors and seniors. Because it’s free time, students who chose to participate in PennCFL’s games are doing so voluntarily — something Martinez, 31, a math teacher of nearly 10 years, encourages.

“Speaking for the students, especially those from where I’m teaching in an urban situation, even speaking for myself — I didn’t learn this stuff. My mom didn’t know how to trade stocks,” said Martinez. “So, I think it gives them the opportunity to get exposed to these things, it allows them to break the generational wealth curses some of us face living in poverty or living as a minority.”

Attinger compares the investing challenge and budgeting game to the way teens are taught how to drive.

“We think this is basically like driving in the parking lot. When we teach kids how to drive, we don’t take them on I-8I or I-95 — we teach them in the parking lot. That’s why we want to provide these programs through the parking lot (model), because it doesn’t hurt them in real life.”

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: How to get ahead in life: Game teaches York PA students about stocks