Students Speak
"I feel learning how to use and manage a checkbook is the most important thing I've learned so far."
"Online simulations have been the most useful things for me. I really enjoyed the Financial Soccer game."
"The most helpful exercises are the ones on virtual business (online simulation). They prepare me for what to expect when I need to take care of my money."
"I think that the virtual business activity...is very helpful to me because it puts my skills to use. Also, doing the checkbook was very helpful because I was able to practice my knowledge of balancing checkbooks to make sure that I'm doing it correctly."
"The most useful exercise for me is the virtual personal financial game. It takes you through step-by-step through how to do things in the lesson. I also like playing the Financial Soccer game because it is a cool game and it quizzes you as you go."
"I think the comic book activities...were most helpful. It was able to communicate some very complicated topics to kids in a way that they better understand."
"I liked doing the comic books and I like doing the current events."
"The personal finance virtual simulation game was the best because it was life like a game that is all about a person new to the real world of jobs and bills."
"I really liked the Financial Football and Financial Soccer games."
"I think that doing...online simulations on businesses, taxes, and forms of ownership have been the most useful to me because they give you the most information about how things work."
"The simulations (balancing a checkbook and reconciling an account) have been the most useful. I still don't really understand fully how to do these things, but if anything doing the simulations has exposed me to it and shown me that I need to start practicing them and learn how to really do it before I get my own credit cards, etc."
"I think that the virtual business finance game that we get to play in class has definitely helped. It shows you how to balance a checkbook and buy food and invest in stocks and pay your bills."
"Learning how to balance a checkbook has been the most useful thing in class I have learned so far. I had no idea how to do this before and now I understand how to."
"I have enjoyed the virtual business program on the computer, because you can actually see how things might actually work, that’s about all."
"Learning about the danger of credit cards in a hand-on way. I also enjoyed the Sims game."
"I thought that everything that we did in class was useful to me like the Virtual Business game."
"When we did the Virtual Personal Financial Management simulation that was very helpful."
"I liked writing checks and reconciling bank statements because since it was so hands-on I got a really good feel for it."
"When we learned about college, that was very helpful because it got us started thinking about what we’re doing after high school."
"The most useful to me was the credit card unit. Before taking this course, I believed that credit cards were God’s gift to people. You can buy whatever you want whenever you want and it seemed as though it wasn't even affecting your bank account, little did I know. This unit taught me about interest fees, as well as hidden fees, and that you should always pay each monthly bill in full if at all possible, if not you actually end up paying way more for a product than if you just bought it with cash and that doesn't seem worth it to me."
"We did a virtual personal management game that taught us how to run our lives in the future like work and education, food and keeping healthy."
"I thought the virtual online games were the most beneficial to me."
"I like the online simulation game. It teaches in an interactive way, that I feel is very beneficial for our learning."
"The exercise that helped me the most were the practices of filling out the actual forums for tax refunds and exemption papers for jobs."
"The virtual personal financial management exercise was very helpful because it was a realistic simulation."
"I thought the most useful exercises were the Virtual Business- Personal Finance activities packets. We had to read about different lessons and then apply them in a game and answer questions about them."
"I liked the Virtual Business simulations on the computer because it was more interactive than simply reading a book and answering questions at the end. It was easy as long as you followed the instructions which were mapped out very clearly."
"I liked writing checks and reconciling bank statements because since it was so hands-on I got a really good feel for it."
"The virtual world activity helped me understand how to survive in the real world financially."
PANS
"I find receiving big packets of information helps me less."
"The least useful exercise is listening to Powerpoint presentations because I tend to tune them out because they are really boring."
"The book work has been the least helpful because it is very easy to just copy the words out of the book and not understand them."
"The least helpful exercises would be questions from the book. I never really read the book and just rush to get the questions done."
"The least helpful thing to me is sitting in class and taking notes on how to do things."
"I didn't understand the Financial Soccer game at all and it didn't help me learn anything; it just pointed out when I was wrong and didn't show me how I got it wrong."
"I found that doing the exercises for taxes online were the least effective."
"I don't think playing the stock market game was very helpful because it didn't teach me what kind of stocks and bonds I should be investing in."
"I don't think the stock market game was very effective because I don't think a lot kids took it seriously and I don't think it really taught us what the stock market is really like."
"The stock market 'game' that we participated in was the least useful thing we did in class. I started out not knowing much about stocks and ended up at about the same level of knowledge as before because we weren't really taught anything about it, we were just expected to know and play the game."
"The least useful exercise for me was probably learning how to invest in the right stocks. I think that's just because we went through it very fast."
"The least useful thing we did was watch that really long video on college and financial aid."
"We really didn’t go on any field trips but I think they would be useful for students."
"We didn’t go on any field trips for personal finance management, but we used virtual computer programs that made you go into the world and live on your own and try and make smart financial choices."
"The movie that was outdated and not at all interesting. The countless worksheets everything blends together and I find it easy to doze off and not know what’s going on."
"There were not any field trips."
"I think the boring power points are least useful. I think that they are hard to pay attention to and not very interactive."
"Things like the stock market I don’t find it pertained too much to me."
"An exercise that was least useful to me was the stock market game, while it did teach you about stocks (purchasing, and selling) I knew it wasn't real therefore I really did not take it seriously. I learned the basics through class; buy low, sell high, I didn't need to spend weeks on a game that I just purchases whatever and didn't really care about."
"PowerPoint wasn’t the best way to keep my attention. I lost my focus because they were pretty boring."
"Playing the virtual business game wasn’t too useful because we mostly learned computer commands on how to make the system work. However I think given a little more time and practice it would help us learn how to operate a real business."
"We have not gone on any field trips! We should."
"I didn’t like playing in the fake stock market because I don’t like taking risks in the stock market and would rather save my money then trust it into a company in a hope to gain a reward.
If there was any way to make it a little more interesting for the students, that in my mind would be the most useful thing. While the class is very important sometimes it is very hard to keep attention just because it seems like the decisions were learning about making is so far away, even though it isn't."
"More hands on or teenager friendly activities would make this class fun as well as educational."
"I think that the stock market game was the least useful because I don’t have any real money to invest so I really don’t care about the stock market and it was too complicated."
"The least useful activities were the video talking about saving for college, I think being a senior in high school it’s a little too late to start saving for college."
"The least useful was the virtual Sim’s business. I found it confusing and didn’t understand what it was teaching."
"I think that the stock market game was the least useful because I don’t have any real money to invest so I really don’t care about the stock market and it was too complicated."
"I didn’t like a few of the videos that we watched because they were very boring and didn’t give us much information that we didn’t already know. I prefer actually doing an activity rather than sitting and watching someone try and explain it to me."
"The exercises I thought were the least useful were the power points. They were a bit lengthy and hard to pay attention to at times."
"The exercise that I thought were the least useful was watching videos about finances and taking notes on them."
"I think the least useful exercise was watching a very long movie that I just could not pay attention to."
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