BOUNTIFUL — For the second year in a row the students at St. Olaf School placed in the top three in the State of Utah’s Stock Market Game.
This year St. Olaf 7th-grade students Amani Alhamdani, Sky Amboy and Haven Walkers placed second out of 462 teams in the Middle School/Junior High Division for the entire state.
Guided by Rick Kelson, St. Olaf math and science teacher, the students played the SIFMA Foundation’s Stock Market Game, an instructional tool used to engage students in financial literacy and math, as well as teach them how to invest in the stock market.
Their participation and recognition is “a testament to the students of St. Olaf and how they apply their education in math and financial literacy to real-world applications,” Kelson said. “It’s awesome seeing our students recognized for outstanding academic excellence.”
For the students, being recognized was a very humble experience as well as one that left them feeling grateful and proud of their school.
“It was a lot of fun and stressful participating in a program that teaches us about financial stuff,” Alhamdani said. “The ups and downs of the Stock Market Game was a lot of fun to watch. We learned how to invest and how to research and read stocks.”
To prepare for their participation, Kelson taught the students about a stock’s beta and highs/lows and 52-week range.
“Mr. Kelson even taught us how to short sell stocks in a bear market,” Amboy said. “The tickers of some of the stocks we bought were IGC, IBM, R and H.”
Kelson said that he prepared the students in many different ways.
“First, I take whatever their math core is and I tie it into real life application – be it algebra, decimals and fraction, or geometry. Students love seeing how their education actually applies to the world,” he said, adding that after that he went on to the basics of financial literacy.
“I teach kids about savings, banking, interest and investments, money management and other dealings in the financial world. I’ll teach them about how to research in a global market economy and how to read stocks,” he said.
Lastly Kelson focused their attention on teamwork and communication, he said.
At the state competition there were more than 1,200 teams, including all the divisions of elementary, junior high and high school teams. For the game, each team is given $100,000 of fake money to invest in real time stocks over a ten-week period in the fall.
Over the ten weeks, St. Olaf’s team made a profit of $12,000. Despite that achievement, their success in the contest wasn’t assured.
“We were really stressed that we wouldn’t make the awards banquet because during the last week, the other teams were starting to catch up with us and we had sold a lot of our stocks,” Walker said.
They were able to eke out a win, however, and so they were among the top three money-making teams honored at the Jan. 4 awards banquet at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City.
“The banquet was awesome because our parents, our teacher Mr. Kelson and Father Rene [Rodillas, pastor of St. Olaf Parish] were able to attend the banquet with us. Super cool! It was a hoot!” Walker said.
“I think it’s extraordinarily important that kids get involved in competitions that provoke thought and that use their education as a foundation for success,” Kelson said. “Opportunities like this have a way of opening doors later in life or making students think about other careers that they may have not necessarily known of or thought about.”
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