You Don't Need To Be A Financial Expert
To Teach Personal Finance

Rapunzl has been a game-changer for my students since I started using it in 2019. I can provide hands-on experience with real-world learning, bringing economic theories to life and enabling students to see the immediate impact of market changes while learning discipline in a risk-free environment.

Rapunzl was an amazing resource when teaching my personal finance unit. My learners loved the interactive stock market simulation and still check their portfolios a month after concluding the unit. The activities regarding the basics of investing were incredibly helpful to get students engaged.

Integrating Rapunzl into our curriculum has sparked renewed interest in math among my students and provided a risk-free way to teach about investing. It's been really helpful to bridge the gap between theory and practical skills by showing the real-world relevance of math skills.

My students never cared much about interest rates until they had money riding on them. When the Fed announced, they watched their own portfolios move, and that did more for them than three days of me at the whiteboard. Now they bring me headlines I haven't read yet.

I've been teaching personal finance a long time and I've never had a class ask to keep using something after the unit ended. This one they did. Diversification stopped being a vocabulary word once they were the ones holding six positions, and the discussion questions saved me from writing my own.

I didn't have to rebuild my curriculum to fit it in, which is honestly my first question about anything new. The data is real but the money isn't, so I can let students lose badly and then talk about why. That conversation is the whole point, and normally I never get to have it.

Students who never said a word in class are now arguing about their picks. The competition is what got them in the door. What kept them there was figuring out that this is the same stuff their parents argue about at the kitchen table.

Middle schoolers ask me constantly when they'll ever use this. Now I have an answer. Percent change matters when it's your own return, and compound growth stops being a formula on the board once they can watch it happen to their account. My class got noticeably louder, in a good way.

Most of my students don't have a bank account, so I can't start where most curriculum wants to start. This one begins at the beginning and builds, and nobody in my room got lost. The bigger thing is that nobody got embarrassed. When there's no real money involved, kids will admit what they don't know.

My business and marketing course is built around it now. Students follow their positions, then stand up and explain to the class why they bought what they bought. Sitting through a bad week without panic-selling is a skill they'll use for a lot more than investing.

Advisory used to be the block students slept through. Now some of them get there before I do. The daily check-in takes about two minutes, and then we end up in the kind of conversation about money and the future I've been fishing for since I started this job.

I'm not a financial expert and I never wanted to fake being one in front of a class. The curriculum handles the content, so my job goes back to running the discussion and helping students connect what they're seeing to whatever they're planning after graduation.

My students walked in convinced the market was rigged against people like them. Nobody talked them out of it. They got a portfolio, real data, and a semester to watch what actually happened, and by the end they'd argued themselves into much more complicated opinions. A few of them still think it's rigged. They just have better reasons now.