Thanks to one of Gary Stager’s recent LinkedIn posts I recently learned about an interesting high school investing and saving activity created by William Frey at Fryeburg Academy (just a few towns over from where I live). 

A Unit on Saving and Investing for High School Students appears to be created to coincide with the use of The Stock Market Game. In the unit students gather and compare data about financial then use that information in the construction of a portfolio. What’s interesting about Mr. Frey’s activity is that students will learn to use the Entity Framework in Wolfram’s Knowledgebase to create and compile comparisons. (Take a look at this page for a demo of Wolfram’s Knowledgebase for finance). 

Applications for Education
What makes Mr. Frey’s activity outstanding is that it can be used to introduce students to programming concepts in the context of a real-world application (identifying and comparing publicly traded companies). This activity takes The Stock Market Game from manual analysis and speculation to programmatic selection.