Setting up your competition game

The Investment Challenge competition period begins on 30 October and ends on 1 December. The 1-hour game you will use for the competition is now available as a game template on your Finance Lab account:

(1) Set up a player account for each student taking part.  Log in to your account, select the Players tab and enter each student’s name, giving them a username and password.  There is an option to upload their details from a spreadsheet to make this process easier if you have a large number of students.

(2) When you’re ready to run the competition, create a new game and select ‘Investment Challenge (Scotland)’ from the Game Version drop-down.  In the Game Name field at the top type ‘Competition Entry’ and the class name (if you have more than one group taking part).

(3) Allocate each of the students to the game in teams of two in the roles of Investment Analyst and Media Analyst.  There must be two students in each team and scores from single player games will be disregarded. If you have an odd number in the class, you can add an extra Media Analyst to one of the teams.

(4) When the students log in using their user name and password they will see the competition game set up on their account. 

Running the game

The competition game can be run any time before midday on Friday 1 December.  You can add and take away players, or change the teams and roles, up until you’ve opened the game screen. After that the game is ‘locked’.

The highest team score at the end of the third 20-minute trading day (Wednesday) will count as your school’s competition score.  

The score will be on the team’s Fund Total, in the event of a tie then the Return on Investment score will be used to decide.

Practice games

The competition game can only be run once so we recommend that your students do some practice beforehand. 

You can set up as many new games as you wish for practice sessions using one of the pre-set templates.  If you want to replicate the competition game settings in your practice sessions, open the game settings, select the Intermediate template from the Game Version drop-down, click on Open Game Settings and change to these parameters:

Trading days:  3 x 20 minutes

Player credits: 400,000 (their starting fund)

News stories:  20 per day

Trade units per day: 40,000

Multiple games

If you’d like to enter the competition with more than one class, you will need to set up an additional competition game on your account.   The only stipulation is that this must be a separate group; the same students can’t take part twice in the competition.