A Discovery Middle School team aced high finance as fourth-place winners in Alabama with The Stock Market Game(tm).

Seventh-grade teacher Christine Jones learned about the game during a professional development class. “I brought it to Discovery because I thought it would be a fun way to teach economic objectives (for stocks, supply and demand and personal budgets) required in seventh-grade civics,” Jones said.

The Stock Market Game offers a library of learning materials correlated to national voluntary and state educational standards in several subjects, including math, economics and English. Fourth-graders through college students have met the challenge.

The financial wizards at Discovery were Vincent Crosby, Jeremy Patrick, Michael Rasch and Joshua Williams. For winning fourth-place, they received $75 and a contest backpack. Earlier, they had ranked in first place for weeks.

These Discovery seventh-graders had no problem with understanding the basics of the stock market. “If you invest your money in a company doing well, you make money. If your company doesn’t do well, you lose money,” Jones said.

In years past, Jones had teams that placed first and second place in the state.

Students competed online from September through December. “Each team is given $100,000 in fake dollars,” she said. Jones allowed students to access computers at Discovery once each week. They also worked from home.

“Students chose the companies they wanted to invest in, looked up stock price and bought stocks from the simulation,” Jones said. “This simulation follows the real stock market. Whatever happens on the real stock market also happens on the simulation.”

Teams traded common stocks and mutual funds from the NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX exchanges.

The Stock Market Game teaches investment methods for money in the real world. “It also teaches that events taking place in the world can affect how well the company they have invested in will do in the stock market,” Jones said.

Around Thanksgiving, economic problems in Europe caused the Discovery students’ companies to drop in value.

For more information, visit alcee.org and stockmarketgame.org.