In this new weekly blog post, Jessica will highlight Just One Resource from our NGPF collection that maybe doesn't get the attention it deserves. Use it this week or bookmark it for later.

[The Resource]  INTERACTIVE: What If You Played the Lottery?

The Gist: The Texas lottery website allows you to select your Powerball numbers and then "check your ticket" to find how much you have won over the past half a year. To illustrate the odds of cashing in big on the lottery, your students each play once but enter their results into a shared spreadsheet, which calculates the total cost they've spent on tickets vs their total winnings. I bet you can anticipate the outcome...

The Best Parts: 

• It's real data from the TX Powerball, so this isn't some contrived situation to teach students a lesson, though they'll most likely see that playing the lottery can cost a lot with minimal reward
• The website tells them their exact winnings in a convenient format, so you don't spend valuable class time on lottery calculations
• Students enter their lottery costs and winnings into a spreadsheet with formulas auto-populated including a summary screen and graph, so they gain exposure to the fundamentals of spreadsheets and see their capabilities without needing to be spreadsheet whizzes themselves 
• The worksheet provides an opportunity for reflection to summarize their learning at the end

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.

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