Why Financial Literacy Competitions Motivate High School Students

I grew up in Bronzeville, on Chicago's South Side, and I learned about money earlier than most kids get the chance to. At Ariel Community Academy, financial literacy started in first grade. By the time I was a teenager, investing was not some far-off adult mystery. It was a thing I did, watched, and cared about, partly because there was always a little something on the line.

That is the piece people underestimate. Teaching students what a diversified portfolio is will get you a correct answer on a quiz. Giving them a reason to want the right answer is a different project entirely. A well-run financial literacy competition for high school students does the second thing. It turns a unit students would otherwise sit through into a season they choose to show up for.

This piece is not a list of competitions to enter. It is about the psychology underneath them: why stakes, purpose, and belonging move students who a worksheet never reached, and how to run a competition that motivates without turning cutthroat.

What actually makes a financial literacy competition motivate students?

A financial literacy competition motivates students because it satisfies three things a normal lesson usually cannot: a clear, challenging goal worth chasing, a tangible reason the effort matters, and a group of peers chasing it alongside you. When a competition delivers all three, students self-direct their own learning. They start checking the news, comparing strategies, and asking better questions, not because a rubric told them to, but because they are invested in an outcome.

Everything below unpacks those three drivers, the research behind each one, and the honest caveat that competition only works when it is designed well.

The psychology of stakes: why a real goal beats "try your best"

Start with the goal itself. Decades of research on goal-setting theory found that specific, challenging goals produce higher performance than vague encouragement to "do your best." As Locke and Latham put it, a specific high goal leads to even higher performance than urging people to do their best, provided the person is committed to it and gets feedback on their progress (Locke & Latham, 2002).

Sit with what that means for a classroom. "Learn about investing this semester" is the vaguest possible goal. "Grow your simulated portfolio and see where your school ranks by late April" is specific, hard, and measurable. A competition converts an abstract standard into a scoreboard, and a scoreboard gives students the two ingredients goal-setting research says they need: a target to commit to and feedback that tells them whether to push harder or change strategy.

The stakes do not have to be enormous to work. They have to be real, and they have to be legible. A student who can see exactly how they are doing, and cares about moving that number, is a student who has stopped waiting for the bell.

Purpose: what students are really playing for

Stakes answer "how am I doing?" Purpose answers "why does this matter to me?" And for a lot of students, especially in the communities Rapunzl was built to serve, the honest answer to a normal finance unit is "it doesn't." That is the gap a meaningful reward closes.

This is where scholarships change the texture of the whole thing. Rapunzl runs a free national scholarship competition each year, open to students at no cost, and to date the program has distributed $300,000 or more in scholarships to participants. That is not a gold star. That is tuition, and every student in the room knows the difference. When the prize is something that genuinely alters what is possible after graduation, the effort stops feeling like schoolwork and starts feeling like an investment in yourself.

I do not say that lightly. I studied Finance at the University of Illinois and co-founded Rapunzl while I was working as a Credit Analyst at CIBC, and the whole reason we built a scholarship into the model is that purpose is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a student who participates and a student who commits.

Belonging: why competing together beats competing alone

Here is the part most people get backwards. They assume a competition motivates by pitting students against each other. The stronger engine is the opposite: competing with people.

Self-determination theory, one of the most established frameworks in motivation research, identifies three basic psychological needs that drive intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Relatedness, the sense of being connected to others, is the one a school-based competition is uniquely good at feeding. When your class, or your whole school, is in the same event, the finance unit becomes a shared experience instead of a solo assignment.

The evidence for this is striking. A 2024 meta-analysis of gamified learning found that the single largest effect of gamification was on students' sense of relatedness (Hedges' g = 1.776), with a meaningful boost to perceived autonomy as well (g = 0.638) (Du, Hew & Li, 2024). In plain terms: the game structure made students feel like they belonged to something and had ownership over their choices. A competition that spans a cohort of classmates, and beyond that a field of peers at other schools, is that mechanism at scale.

The motivational drivers, and the research behind them

Competence and autonomy: the simulator is the vehicle

Notice that two of those drivers, competence and autonomy, depend entirely on how students compete. A trivia contest gives you a right-or-wrong answer and not much room for ownership. A live market does something better.

In the Rapunzl competition, the vehicle is a real-time investment simulator: students manage a simulated portfolio priced with live market data, so the decisions are theirs and the feedback is immediate. That combination is exactly what self-determination theory says builds competence, an optimal challenge paired with real feedback, and exactly what builds autonomy, choices the student actually owns. When a company they picked jumps or drops during seventh period, they are not memorizing volatility. They are living it, and then they want to know why.

That is the moment a finance unit becomes sticky. Not the lecture. The move.

How to run a competition that motivates without turning cutthroat

Competition has a dark side, and pretending otherwise does students no favors. Done badly, it can produce anxiety, shame, and a sense that the game was rigged for the students who already had an advantage (EdSurge, 2023). The goal is constructive competition, not a zero-sum bloodbath. A few principles hold up well in the research and in practice:

• Make the stakes about growth, not just ranking. Reward improvement and reasoning, not only the top of the leaderboard. Grading the thinking behind a trade keeps the students in the middle of the pack engaged.
• Keep participation and rules transparent from day one. Clear, upfront rules and optional-feeling low-pressure entry are consistently flagged as what separates healthy competition from harmful competition (EdSurge, 2023).
• Do not assume it only works for the naturally competitive. A 2025 study of constructive competitive classroom activities found no meaningful difference in learning outcomes between students with high and low competitiveness; the less competitive students were not adversely affected (DiFrancesca & Spencer, 2025). Well-designed competition is safe to use with a whole class, not just the sports-captain types.
• Debrief the losses. The student whose portfolio dropped learned the most valuable lesson in the room. Make space to talk about why, so a loss becomes insight instead of embarrassment.

Where Rapunzl fits

I am biased, obviously. But the design choices we made map directly onto the psychology above, and that is not an accident. Rapunzl's national scholarship competition runs each year from January through late April, it is free for students to participate, and in a recent season it drew 50,000 or more students from 500 or more high schools. The competition is built on the same real-time simulator students use in class, so the stakes (a scholarship), the feedback (a live portfolio), and the belonging (a national field of peers) are all in one place.

Zoom out and the pattern is bigger than any single event. Rapunzl has inspired 150,000 or more students since 2018, and the founders were named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023 for this work. A competition is not a gimmick bolted onto that. It is the engine that gets students to care enough to learn the thing in the first place.

See the psychology in action. Explore the simulator, the curriculum, and the scholarship competition your students can join. Explore Rapunzl for your classroom

By Myles Gage, Co-Founder and CMO of Rapunzl.