School board introduced to Stock Market Game
By Curt Nettinga

HOT SPRINGS – Dustin Fischer and Dan Friendshuh, seniors in a class taught by Susan Wendt, gave the Hot Springs School Board a quick glimpse of an educational game in which they and other students are involved.

The students and Wendt were at the Nov. 10 school board meeting.

“There are 203 teams playing in the state,” Wendt told the board. “And 11 teams in Hot Springs.”

“There are six teams with three people on each team in our class,” Fischer said. “What happens is that each team is given $100,000 in virtual money to invest.”

Friendshuh said that to keep teams from buying and selling quickly, they are accessed a 2 percent commission on every transaction. “That also discourages selling short on stocks,” he added.

Stocks that are available are those listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the virtual buying or selling of common stocks in American companies is similar to what happens on the trading floor every day.

“What the students learn is how to research a company and determine whether purchasing stock in the company is a good thing,” Wendt said. “Although, with the way the market has been lately, it has been a tough go.”

Friendshuh said that they have discovered many different places to go on the Internet to do research on a stock. “We bought Google,” he said, “because the research showed that it was very near it’s average low over the past couple of years and could be set to go up in price, which it did for awhile. Then it fell again.”

Wendt said that the professor at Black Hills State University who is overseeing the game told her that in the 22 years he has been involved, he has never seen such volatility in the market.

According to the game’s website, the program began in 1977 and more than 10 million students have ‘played’ in that time. Teams in all 50 states and in many international countries are involved.

Overall, Friendshuh said that since the game started on Oct. 2, their team has shown a 17 percent increase in value. “Two weeks ago we were up to sixth in the state, but now we are somewhere around 100.”

Wendt said that teams in Hot Springs have been as high as second, “and as low as 203rd. It depends on what has happened that day. Most of the time when the students walk into class, they know where they stand in the rankings already.”

Dr. Donald Marchant, the Superintendent of Schools said that since the company that had the state laptop business has run into financial difficulties, the laptop computers for the ninth and tenth grade students have not yet been received. Marchant said that the laptops – for all grades – have been reordered from Hewlett-Packard. “Hewlett-Packard is a very recognized name in the computer business,” Marchant told the board. “The laptops will be similar to those we did receive previously, but could cost a little bit less.”

According to the district’s technology director John Hohn, the process really began a year and a half ago, when a company called Micron Personal Computers, or MPC, purchased the state and local government portion of the business from Gateway Computers.

The State of South Dakota began its Laptop Initiative - to put laptop computers in every high school - with Gateway products that were manufactured in the state. The Hot Springs School had purchased the laptops on its own, outside the state program, but through the state bid. With the difficulties at MPC, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Nov. 7, the schools who purchased through the state program, cannot get parts or repairs through the company.

“This will mean a bit of re-training for the juniors and seniors who have the Gateway laptops already,“ Marchant said. He is unsure of what will happen with the Gateway laptops that have been delivered already. Marchant said the company which was providing the loan for the laptops has not paid anything to MPC as of yet, as not all of the computers were delivered.

“The order has been placed,” confirmed Hohn, “and as HP now has the state bid we should see the new machines here within a couple of weeks, although we are at the mercy of the provider.” Hohn said that he didn’t know what was to take place with the machines currently in use.