The original version of the activity  MOVE: Up and Down with Credit Scores encourages students to move around the classroom to kinesthetically model how financial decisions can impact their credit score. At a time where many schools have transitioned to offering synchronous and asynchronous learning and/or limited movement in the classroom, we’ve created an adaptation activity that may work for your current classroom environment. 

PLAY: Guess My Credit Score is an adapted activity that was designed using a WSJ article about credit scores and also covers key concepts in the MOVE: Up and Down with Credit Scores activity. In PLAY: Guess My Credit Score students will go through various scenarios and guess what the ending credit score will be while learning how different actions can decrease or increase a person’s credit score. 

Here are some ideas on how to facilitate the activity PLAY: Guess My Credit Score:

• Whether teaching in-person or virtually, students could use whiteboards to write what they think the credit score will be after each question/scenario. Then, call on students to explain the rationale behind their answer.
• If teaching virtually, have students utilize the chat to post their answers after each question. 
• If teaching virtually, put students in Breakout Rooms for only a few minutes to discuss and provide a guess to what the credit score will be and why. Have a representative from each breakout room report their answer to the whole group. Change the Breakout Room for each scenario. 
• If teaching in-person, start by having all students stand up before you read the scenario. If they think the credit score will go up, instruct students to remain standing. If they think the credit score will go down, instruct them to sit down. Then call on students individually to guess what they think the credit score will be. 
• If you want to simplify the activity a bit, provide students a range of different credit scores to choose from such as 600-680, 681-720, etc. and poll students to see what they think the correct answer will be. Or provide a bingo-style board of credit score numbers and have students choose which one they think the ending credit score could be. (Hint: both of these ideas could be incorporated in the face-to-face or virtual classroom using the Nearpod Poll or Draw It activity feature.) 

A few important points:

• PLAY: Guess My Credit Score is NOT identical to MOVE: Up and Down With Credit Scores, but was created as an adaptation of the activity. 
• For each of the scenarios, students assume they are a credit newbie. They will always start with a credit score of 599 for each scenario.

Looking for more suggestions on how to facilitate an NGPF activity in a virtual environment? View NGPF’s Virtual Adaptation Series!

About the Author

Amanda Volz

Amanda joins the NGPF Team with over 20 years of experience teaching personal finance. During that time, she led her students to hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships, won multiple awards, and most importantly, impacted the financial lives of thousands of high school students. Amanda prides herself on being an educational leader and is constantly looking for innovative ways to make the classroom relevant, rigorous, and fun. She is a passionate advocate for financial education and has been a long-time member of the NGPF community. Fun fact - Amanda was NGPF’s first teacher account! When Amanda isn’t working, she enjoys cooking, gardening, and traveling with her husband and two children.

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