Balancing Act!

Classroom Budgeting Simulation Game

Budgeting sounds like a boring topic, doesn’t it? Well it doesn’t have to be. Our Balancing Act classroom game makes the topic and experience of budgeting actually fun. Balancing Act is an instructor-led, interactive classroom game and simulation, appropriate for either high school or college students. It can be taught either in-classroom or as a remote learning experience. The game takes students through a simulation of choosing a career, getting an apartment and all the lifestyle amenities for the life they want to lead, provided that their budget tells them they can afford that lifestyle. The simulation shows students how making tradeoffs in one budget category will help them afford those things that they simply can’t or don’t want to trade off. The game ends with six rounds of budget stress-testing in a game of chance we call Life Happens! It’s a fun and enlightening experience for the whole classroom. You can play the game with as few as one player or as many as your physical or virtual classroom can hold. The game is fully scripted for the benefit of the facilitator.

All the game components come loaded onto a USB drive. Drive includes the following:

• Facilitator Instructions
• Presentation slides (PowerPoint and PDF format)
• Facilitator Script (PDF format)
• Printable participant tally sheet/budget (PDF and auto-calculating Excel format)
• Print and cut A-B-C tiles for the rounds of Life Happens! (PDF format)
• Printable savings account register for the rounds of Life Happens! (PDF format)
  

Technical requirements: Mac or Windows computer with a USB port; Minimum software requirement: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Ideal software requirement: Adobe Acrobat Reader; Microsoft PowerPoint; Microsoft Excel. Facilitator should have the ability to project the presentation onto a large screen or smart board.