Hi Peggy

I would say go for it. I had a little different type of experience with my wife's fifth grade class. I wrote an application in VFP for the class called REALWORLD. The kids earned money each week, $50 per day, reduced by $10.00 for each assignment that they did not complete. They also had to pay desk rental each month, pay taxes and a few other expenses.

Each child had a check book where they kept track of their checks and deposits. The pay checks were printed by the computer and the payments were also record in the system. The students had to reconcile their bank account to the statements they received each month from the computer. They also had to make the decision whether they wanted to deposit their money in their savings account or their checking account.

Once they accumlated saving equal to 1 months salary they could invest in the stock market. I let them pick 20 stocks which we then tracked. They could then buy and sell these stock. The stock prices used were downloaded from the internet. The buying and selling was frantic. Each child also carried their own stock portfolio much like a check book

I also allowed the kids to invest $3000, real money that I donated to the class, and any earning from that they would split up at the end of the year based on the total amount of money they had in their checking, savings and stock portfolio. It was interesting to hear the discussions on which stocks to buy.

There was a lot more involved such as the school board committee, that had to set a budget using the desk rentals and taxes and then later explaining to the class why they had to raise taxes etc.

I wrote the programs, however everything was handled by the kids. I initally wrote a big manual and quickly realized that it was a wasted effort as the kid pick it up immediately after I did a demo of the progam.

Another thing we did was bringing in a broker from Merril Lynch who explained how to evaluate stocks and gave them a methodology for doing it. He explained it the first time he came in and by his second visit they were pretty good at evaluting stocks based on that methodology.

I had one bright young fellow that was my web master and he would publish the standing and other data on the school web. He made some neat web pages. Far better than the ones I created.

I am sharing the following because when I started most people said it was too advanced for the kids. Well it wasn't and it was a great sucess. I would come in 1 hour each week and explained how interest worked, what are stocks etc. The kids absorbed it all like sponges. The kids were amazing and they thoroughly enjoyed it.

An added benefit was some mothers said their kids refused to miss a day of school as they didn't want to lose the $50 of pay.


I like your idea and I would go for it.

Gaylen































>Help. I am an elementary school teacher and want to teach my very bright dyslexic 4th grade students how to use VFP. I want to learn how to make a very simple game for them to recreate and then later, let them create a game of their own. I am very confused. It was easy to install VFP. After that, I have been at a loss. Once the command box comes up, how do I figure out what words to choose? Where do I go look for the proper vocabulary? How did you learn it? Thanks for the help. Peggy