Today I learned that the economics teacher and the ex-lawyer headmaster (uber-principal / head dude) at our tiny HS are designing a business competition for the seniors. They will be issued differing amounts of money/scrip, and the winners are the ones with the biggest profit and the biggest ROI. The kids will be charged scrip for any service they buy: wall space for ads, borrowing school equipment, having ads read during morning announcements, presentation equipment for Market Day, real world ingredients/materials. They also have to pay taxes at the end.
If you have any suggestions at all, please chip in, but two things are undecided right now:
If we copy folded money and stamp it to make scrip, what’s stopping kids from making color copies and counterfeiting? We could make ours color, and we could get special paper, but the craftier ones could find the paper.
Wait, just writing that, I think I have the answer: We have each staffer who takes money keep a log of how much is paid by whom, and the kid-auditing teams at the end make sure no one spent more than they were issued. I guess that does it? It does let someone cheat a little by buying more real-world equipment and claiming it only cost a little, though. I guess the audit teams will have to judge whether the purchases look reasonable.
The other thing is that we’d like to include all sorts of things like having to be bonded, buy a DBA, and get insured. The problem lies with insurance. In the real world you’re worried about the liability of getting sued, so you buy maybe a little more insurance than you would really like, because you’re worried. I guess maybe we have the headmaster assign fines for anything damaged or spilled, and they may need their insurance company to cover them? That might work, but does anyone have a better idea?
I think it depends what the objectives of the exercise are. To me, it sounds like you may be over-emphasizing mechanics. Is the real challenge to have them come up with a creative business idea that leads to high ROI? Or is it to teach them the day to day mechanics of running a business? The creativity angle sounds like more fun. If that’s what you’re going for, I would just assess everyone a percentage for overhead and educate them a little bit on what that includes, like insurance.
As far as counterfeiting, I think putting anyone who does that in real-life in-school suspension would be a great lesson for tomorrow’s financial pros. Have a trial and everything! Plaster their faces across the school newspaper! Make daily announcements as the scandal unfolds. Have the principal “perp walk” them out of class!
I think the econ teacher, who has a small business on the side, wants to show them the kinds of things that are involved. I think things like insurance and the forms are going to be much smaller points than deciding on a product and a marketing plan. That should be the fun part.
I’m proposing for next year to have the staff investing in bonds from business groups. Kids would make pitches about their products and offer bonds at interest rates they chose. The staff would compete for the most money made from bonds. The kids would go bananas trying to get investment capital.
I’m not sure what you mean. The kids will be carrying out the plan. There will be a Market Day on which they will sell their product. What’s the difference if they are hypothetical adults? I guess that’s what they are. They have to file all these permits and pay taxes. I don’t think I get your point.