Teachers Corner: Get a Life (and a House)

By Jay Bloodworth
January 27, 2006

I teach math to seventh and eighth grade students in a middle school. For the past few years I have done an activity on home buying as a part of my lesson on exponential growth and compound interest. It worked like this: The students were randomly assigned a career and appropriate salary for themselves and their spouse. Using these figures, they computed what house payment they could afford as a percentage of their combined monthly income. They then looked through real estate magazines to choose a house they wanted, and used a financial application on a graphing calculator to determine the monthly mortgage payment and whether or not they could afford it.

It’s a good activity, and the students always enjoy it. They love imagining being grown up: making money, having a family, etc. Most of them don’t know anything at all about down payments or interest rates or credit ratings, but they are eager to learn about them because they see the relevance for their future lives. It’s an eagerness I don’t usually see when we talk about, say, quadratic equations.

In spite of all of these pros, the one big con I saw in the activity as written was the randomization of the students’ future “lives”. To some extent, I could chalk this feeling up to general gamer snobbery on my part, but I still had genuine pedagogic reasons for thinking the exercise could be improved by a dollop more decision making. Actually, I think the reasons are pretty obvious: If students get a chance to see how decisions they make about school, career, savings, and family affect their future quality of life, they might be more thoughtful in making those decisions, and thoughtful decision making is something that every teacher wants for his students. I tried to come with some mechanisms on my own to let students make “realistic” choices with home buying consequences, but everything I came up with was thematically forced, or overly complex, or both. I also asked around for suggestions for published games with “real life” mechanics, but no one I asked was able to point me towards anything I could use.

I finally found what I was looking for through pure serendipity. At a gaming event I attended last year, eight year old Ben, who was there with his Dad, spent the weekend constantly recruiting adults to play his favorite game: The Game of Life Card Game. I balked at first when I landed in Ben’s sights, but a passerby who had already had his turn told me it was actually a pretty good game. So I played it, and it was. I enjoyed it enough that I accepted an invitation from Ben to play again later in the weekend. By the end of the second play I knew I had found the perfect mechanical engine to drive the “Get a Life” portion of my house activity.

The Game of Life Card Game won’t win any prizes for innovation, but its mechanics are simple, clever, and fit the theme well. Each player has a Career card, chosen from a limited selection at the beginning of the game or a greater selection after three turns if the player chooses to go to college. A career grants the player a budget of points to spend each turn in two categories: Time and Money (players who go to college have a small amount of time to spend but no money). On a given turn, a player may spend time or money but both. Players have a hand of cards, each representing a life event or activity, like “Put In Overtime” or “Soccer Games”. Each has a cost in either time or money, and most have a victory point value. A few have special effects or restrictions. Each turn, players draw their hands up to five, decide whether to spend time or money then plays as many cards as they like, as long as the total time or money value played doesn’t exceed the limit for his career. Any time after having a career players have the option to get married; the “Get Married” cards come from a common pool rather than the players’ hands, but are otherwise like any other card that costs time. A player ends his turn by discarding one card face up to the discard pile; this card is available as the first draw card for the next player. At the beginning of the game, four cards with the letters L-I-F-E are shuffled into the bottom half of the draw deck; the game ends immediately when the last of these is drawn. The player with the most victory points wins.

As I said, it’s an elegant ruleset, but I did have to adapt it a bit to make it work with my activity. In terms of the game play itself, I actually didn’t change much. The major change I made was using only the “Early Life” half of the draw desk. This was in the interests both of time and in focusing the simulation on events likely to occur before someone buys their first house. The other change I made is that where I had four students playing together they played as individuals, just as in a three player game; the published rules say four players should play in partnerships.

The real work I had to do was coming up with a mapping between game outcomes and the variables in the home buying activity. Obviously, careers transferred over directly, but I still had to figure out what to do about salaries. I considered making the salary a simple function of the Career card’s “Money” value, but I ultimately decided to gather some data online (mostly at Salary.Com) and use it to generate a table of reasonable annual salaries for the careers. Many of the career categories on the cards are pretty broad and suggest a comparably broad salary range. In general I skewed my numbers towards the low end of the ranges, thinking in terms of the early part of the students’ careers. But any student who played a “Get a Promotion” card during the game got to increase his salary by 10% for each such card played.

Whether or not a student was married could be determined by his card play, but there is nothing is the game’s mechanics to assign the spouse a career. So after each table finished their game I collected the Career cards and dealt one to each married player to specify the spouse’s career. I threw in a small wrinkle, though; where if the career dealt matched anyone else’s career at the table, the spouse was actually a stay at home Mom or Dad and did not bring in additional income. This was all of course random and fairly arbitrary, but it kept the focus on the students’ decisions, not their imaginary spouses’.
Winning the game earned the student a 6% rate on a 30 year mortgage; everybody else payed 7%. The connection between these two things is somewhat tenuous, I’ll admit, but I wanted winning the game to matter a little and the notion that being a “winner” in life is reflected in one’s credit rating is not unreasonable.

I determined students’ savings toward a down payment two ways. If the total cost of the Time cards they had played exceeded the total cost of the Money cards, they got $10,000 in the bank to reflect their thrifty nature. Also, each “Save For a Rainy Day” card left on the table at the end of game gave its player $5,000 in savings.

I tried the new improved home buying activity with the card game center with my three algebra classes last week. So how did it all work? Pretty well, though as always in teaching there were issues and problems I didn’t anticipate. I gave what I think was a pretty clear rules explanation (improving throughout the day) to each class, but many of the tables just didn’t get what they were supposed to be doing until I came around and lead them through a sample turn. Even after they got going many groups were missing or misplaying rules: forgetting to discard, ignoring special text on cards, etc. While I tried to correct these mistakes when I spotted them early enough, I didn’t worry too much about them. The point of playing the game was to let the card play simulate making life decisions, so as long as that was happening I was mostly happy. Interestingly, the one group that needed absolutely no help beyond the initial rules explanation was a table of three boys who were members of the game club. Seems as though practice makes perfect when it comes to learning the rules to new games.

One problem that seemed to show up in some groups but not others was that the game was over too quickly, some players not getting a single turn after graduating from college. The rules errors some groups made may have contributed to this, but I think using only half the deck was large part of the problem. In the future, I will probably combine the “Early Life” cards from two copies of the game to make one deck. Another change I am considering for next time is letting students make their own decisions about whether they have a stay at home or working spouse, but making them consider child care costs if both parents work, though I’ll have to carefully consider whether the extra complication is worth the extra realism.

I would encourage any teachers of young teenagers to track down a few copies of The Game of Life Card Game and give this activity a whirl with your students. The math connection is obvious, but I think it could be easily made to work in a social studies or even language arts class, especially if you were to add a writing component. Anyone is welcome to use my materials and to modify them as you see fit; in addition to the student worksheet the PDF contains the table of salaries I used for the careers in the game. If you don’t have access to a calculator with financial applications, many simple mortgage payment calculators can be found online. Anyone who does use this activity or a version of it, I’d love to hear about your successes, difficulties, and innovations. Contact me at jbloodworth@sc.rr.com.

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