EDUCATION
Two fifth-grade gifted students from Mattie Wells Elementary School competed in the Georgia Council of Economic Education’s Stock Market Game in the fall and won first place for elementary school students in the state of Georgia.
Caroline Baker, gifted teacher at Mattie Wells Elementary School, said her two students, Keagan Stafford and Rayden Faulk, were the two students who won in the stock market game recently. She said they attended a luncheon for an awards ceremony this May at the Atlanta Fox Theatre.
“The stock market game is a game we play for ten weeks. I found out about it when I attended a conference by the Georgia Council of Economic Education,” she said. “They give you the fictional $100,000 to work with and the goal is to win the most net equity. They could not spend more than 30% of their portfolio in one stock and stocks had to be in Nasdaq, Nysa or AmEx traded.”
She said the students learned how to read statistics from Google Finance and Yahoo Finance. She said they had to learn the risks of what they were doing. She said they were ranked with all grade levels during the game, and it’s a national game.
“They ended up getting first place for elementary school in the state of Georgia. That’s a pretty big thing. For them to invite us to the Atlanta Fox Theatre for the luncheon was something really neat. I’m proud of them for getting so far,” Baker said.
Stafford said he was excited to win the stock market game for elementary school students in Georgia. He said there were lots of rules they had to follow to play the game, and they had to do lots of research on stocks. He said he hopes to become a biologist one day.
“We didn’t know much about the stock market, but we’d trade and then check after three days to see how they were doing. The main thing was to get a high equity. I didn’t know much about stocks until this class,” he said.
Faulk said he might do something with stocks in the future when he’s old enough.
He said he enjoyed the competitiveness of the stock market game. He wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up, because he likes dinosaurs and digging.
“We checked a lot of new stocks. I would check the smaller stocks, not the bigger stocks. The big stocks would be worse,” the student said. “We learned how to look through the stocks, determine which were good or bad and how to do different kinds of trades.”
Baker said the game was important for them to participate in, because they learned a lot of math through the game. She said they had to learn to spend the money, because it was so much to work with. The game gave them a chance to learn about economics and play with it a bit. She said she plans on letting her students play the game again next year.
“They learned that stocks are a risky business. Letting them fail sometimes is very important,” the teacher said. “They learn a lot from their mistakes, and this gives them flexibility. I hope some of these students do something with stocks in the future.”
