Fun Activities To Get Your High School Students Interested In Investing

I think we can all agree that we did not learn enough about finance generally, but specifically investing, back in high school. 

Not only was what we learned about investing and finance rather limited, but for a lot of us, the way we learned about these things was quite boring. 

To that end, we want to give you, as an educator, some ideas for fun activities you can use to get your high school students really and truly interested in investing. 

1. Risk vs Reward Activity (Time Off At The End of Class)

Play an occasional risk versus reward game that offers your students the opportunity to knock a few minutes of the lesson off the end of a class – because we know that there’s nothing kids at this age love more than less school. 

Give them a question, related to whatever you are teaching, with a few minutes left before the end of the period. Provide them with this prompt: “I have a question. If you choose to answer it as a group and you get it right, you get let out of class five or ten minutes early on Friday but get the question wrong and this class will go right until the bell rings for the next two Fridays”. 

This will begin helping them develop the ability to weigh risk versus reward, a fundamental understanding necessary for young investors and seasoned ones that will surely encourage their interest and understanding of investing from an early age.

2. Stock Decision-Making Game (“This Or That”)

Create a powerpoint or use another software to create a “this or that” type of activity where you have your students choose between two companies from which they can buy stocks (say Apple vs Tesla, for instance). Without them seeing, compile historical data and future projections of both companies they are choosing between. Once everyone has chosen between two particular stocks in a set, showcase who made the good or better choice and who chose poorly by exposing them to the data you compiled. We believe this will encourage their curiosity and interest in investing by providing practical application to the lessons you are teaching them and showing them the research required when choosing where to invest their money. 

3. The Global Investment Challenge from Explorer Hop

The final activity we would recommend is our very own Global Investment Challenge, where children ages 11-17 compete virtually to see who can take their initial $30,000 in investment funds and create the most successful portfolio of stocks, mutual funds, fixed income etc. in around a month’s time. In other words, this competition allows your students to take the education you have given them and the foundation created by the two activities listed above and turn it into “real” practice through this virtual simulation. To top it off, the winner of this challenge takes home a $500 grand prize, so get your students to register for this competition soon and see if they can come out on top of the rest of the field!

We hope that these activities have sparked your creative juices and given you some exciting strategies for how to entice your students to become more interested and engaged with how to invest and learning about investing more generally. 

If you would d like more information like this, continue to check out our blogs but also take a look at our website to learn more about our Global Educator's Circle community of educators we have developed to help each other out and provide benefits like training workshops and financial literacy workshops as well.