I can pretty confidently say that I learned about loans and interest rates from a computer game.
It was summer in the late 1990s, and I retreated to our damp and cool Midwestern basement for several hours a day to play Roller Coaster Tycoon (RCT) on my family’s desktop computer. The game sets you up as a theme park designer tasked with building a thriving park full of haunted houses, roller coasters, concession stands, and imaginative scenery. To win each level, you must achieve a set of goals displayed on the first day the park opens. You might need 2,000 guests by the end of year three, or maybe you need to have five roller coasters rated “high excitement” by the end of year two.
Though it debuted in 1999, RCT is still highly rated in the computer game community for its intricate design and realistic features. When designing a roller coaster, you can watch as the ride records stats on G forces, number of drops, and top speed. Guests get lost if you place too many pathways or make them too meandering. Each guest enters with a certain amount of cash in their pocket and will display thoughts like “I can’t afford to go on Mad Mouse!” after spending a few hours in the park.
Along with guest spending, there’s an impressive amount of financial data in the game. You can look at concession records and figure out which of your four ice cream stands is making the most per hour and which one should be demolished and replaced with a popcorn stand. You can study the financial records of the park overall, looking for things like rides that cost more to run than what they earn in profit. Maintenance workers, mechanics, and security guards can be hired, but you’ll take a hit at the beginning of each month when you have to pay their salaries. But don’t worry—if you go in the red, you can take out a loan!
It’s in this game that I learned about interest—loans were hard to pay back! I also discovered that building a small attraction the minute I had $600 to pay for it wasn’t the best strategy—it was better to save up money for a couple of hours and then build a big expensive roller coaster that guests would pay a lot to ride. I figured out how to read a budget ledger with its green and red lines and discovered what net value was. All of this learning happened when I was between eight and thirteen, and none of it happened at school. As I continued into high school, I still don’t think I took a class—even economics!—that taught me as much as RCT. (Honorable mention: having to budget my meager savings in the game Oregon Trail.)
I often hear my high school students complain that we don’t teach them things they’ll need in the “real world.” It’s usually around the time that they get their first jobs and have to fill out a form and set up an appointment to get fingerprinted, or they’re trying to figure out how working fifteen hours last week only netted them about $100 after taxes. These “life skills” are often financial in nature, and though we teach kids the very basics of money, it can be really tricky to create the authentic-feeling scenarios they might experience in something like a video game.
This month’s issue was inspired by some of those conversations with my high schoolers. I hoped to get authors who would share some strategies for teaching students about money. And I did! Susan Dykshoorn shares many great strategies for making financial literacy (which looks different in our cashless era) part of every activity in the elementary classroom—not just the math units. Chris Steenhof also offers several practical strategies for getting students to think about money, and he acknowledges the difficulty of those discussions in a wealthy Christian school and in a world full of inequality.
Professors Luciano Cid and Shane Enete extend financial literacy to adults, arguing that if we teachers haven’t learned financial wisdom (as I never really did in school), there’s only a small chance we’ll effectively train our students. Miriam Lili’s challenging experience with a student-run charity event at her school acts as a sort of case study, incorporating financial literacy with Christian values. Simon Jeynes ends our issue with a district-level view, discussing the pitfalls of transactional fundraising and offering suggestions for more intentional philanthropy in our school communities.
My to do list this month includes another “real life” financial task I never learned about in school—it’s tax season. I can’t blame my teachers, because I don’t actually think it would be helpful for them to have explained what a standard deduction is to a sixteen-year-old. But I’m reminded that money is a vital and complicated part of our lives—one that can’t be left out of Kuyper’s “every square inch.” I hope this month’s issue inspires you to find ways to add some financial discussions to your classroom—even if it’s just on your board game shelf (Monopoly, anyone?) or approved computer game list.
