Financing a College Education lesson

Mathematics Teacher shares a favorite lesson on Financing a College Education

"During the College Project, students investigate a college of their choice to determine the true cost of attendance (tuition, room and board, books, student fees, travel expenses, fun money, etc.) We use recent growth rates to predict the increase in tuition for each year that they will be in college and come up with a grand total, which is always a staggering amount. Next, each student creates a plan to determine how to cover the costs: parental contribution, summer jobs, work-study, scholarships, loans. Students make a formal presentation to their parents, outlining the costs and their plan. They also submit a paper detailing their calculations and create a poster."

A complete description is available at http://www.nctm.org/publications/article.aspx?id=30924

The Backpage: My Favorite Lesson
Financing a College Education
Laura M. Crowley Edited by Jodie A. Miller
Mathematics Teacher
October 2011, Volume 105, Issue 3, Page 240

Thanks to Marketplace for spotlighting this lesson.

Third World Farmer game

3rd World Farmer is a free online simulation game. Players make decisions on planting crops & purchasing tools & buildings. Unpredictable events-- drought, fire, disease-- are common. The goals are to survive and to improve the family's material well-being. Both are challenging.

The interface is easy to use & the game itself is fairly engaging.



From the developers' press release:

"3rd World Farmer is a new kind of game. An experiment in the genre of Serious Games, it aims at simulating the real-world mechanisms that cause and sustain poverty in 3rd World countries.

In the game, the player gets to manage an African farm, and is soon confronted with the often difficult choices that poverty and conflict necessitate. We find this kind of experience efficient at making the issues relevant to people, because players tend to invests their hopes in a game character whose fate depends on him. We aim at making the player "experience" the injustices, rather than being told about them, so as to stimulate a deeper and more personal reflection on the topics.

We think the game has the potential to be an eye-opener to people who have become accustomed to the ordinary means of communicating third world desperation. Our aim is to have everybody play the game, reflect, discuss and act on it. The game is well suited to start off discussions about 3rd World issues, so we also encourage teachers to use it in their classes"

Play the game: www.3rdworldfarmer.com

Read more about it at: www.gamesforchange.org/main/gameprof/663

Visualizing unemployment

The American Observer shows the dynamics of unemployment during this recession:
The Decline: The Geography of a Recession




http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

Copyright curriculum materials

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a free online curriculum for teaching about copyright.

from their webpage:

"The lesson plan concludes with a mock trial that tests the students' understanding of copyright and its limitations and encourages them to consider the positions of each party involved.

Unit Goals

* Educate students about copyright law, including the concepts of fair use, free speech, and the public domain.
* Explore the relationship between copyright law and innovation, showing how the courts and lawmakers have struggled to build a legal framework to both compensate artists and encourage innovative uses of creative works and new technologies.
* Help students understand their legal rights and responsibilities with respect to copyright and technology use.

Objectives for Students

* Critical and creative thinking: brainstorming, analyzing historical and contemporary sources, and questioning group and individual assumptions.
* Social skills: collaborating with peers.
* Communication: participating in group discussions, debates, class projects, and role-play; demonstrating comprehension by commenting (orally and in writing) on the material clearly and effectively.
* Research: collecting, organizing, and synthesizing data from various sources (scholastic articles, commercial news sources, Internet, video/film, music, art, and literature)."

http://www.teachingcopyright.org/curriculum/hs

Banking crisis

"This American Life", from Chicago Public Radio, has an excellent show explaining the current banking crisis. They illustrate it using a dollhouse loan that goes bad:

"Mark to market, that's another phrase you might have heard. And it applies to exactly the situation Adam is in right now. He's got a dollhouse on his books for 100, but if he had to sell it now, he could only get 50 - that's the market price, what he could get right now. Marking it to market means Adam would have to enter the market price - 50 dollars - or 20 dollars - or whatever it really is - into his books.

And the bankers have all been saying 'please don't make me do that,' because if you do, I'll be declaring bankruptcy."

You can hear the podcast or read a complete transcript of the program at their website.

The Credit of Crisis visualized

Here's a clear explanation of the foundations of the financial crisis by Jonathan Jarvis

Saving

Saving Money in Plain English is a simple introduction to savings and compound interest.