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A STUDY GUIDE
10) Pre-Game Lesson Plan 3:
The Importance of Managing Your Finances

Grades 7-12

Karma Tycoon rocks the gaming world by offering you a thrilling ride through the world of social entrepreneurship as you earn Karma in virtual communities across the US.

To access these unit chapters, click on their titles above.

This lesson focuses on the financial aspects of running a nonprofit organization. Students will apply math skills to real-world situations.

• To understand financial aspects of running a not-profit (start-up costs including expenses, rent payroll, utilities, supplies).
• To identify sources of income and to learn the difference between grants and loans.

Annual percentage rate (APR), balance sheet, credit card, credit line, finance charge, grants, loans

• Vocabulary Handout (See Lesson 6)
• Types of Money Worksheet
• Grants and Loans Interest Rate Worksheet

Background Information (10-15 min.)
• Explain to students that finances are important to both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Nonprofits often have to worry about their revenue and spending even more because they are often working with such scarce resources. In addition, just because an organization is a nonprofit doesn't mean that it cannot charge its customers for its services or sell goods.
• Hand out the definitions for the grant, loan, credit card and balance sheet Vocabulary Handout and the Types of Money Worksheet. Have students break up into pairs and create a table which illustrates the positives and negatives of each source of money - using a credit card, applying for a grant, or taking out a loan.

Applying Math to Real-World Situations (15-20 min.)
• To drive home the point about the difference between a grant and a loan, write on the board the four different loan amounts that are represented in Karma Tycoon: 5k, 10k, 15k, and 20k with an interest rate of 10%.
• For more advanced students, use a 14% interest rate on each loan for more difficult math (this is the interest rate represented in the game). Vary the interest rate on each type of loan as well as the years allowed to pay it back.
• Pass out the Loan Interest Rate Worksheet. Have the students calculate how much they will be paying back for each type of loan versus a grant for the same amount.

Class Discussion: Cash or Credit? (10-15 min.)
• During Karma Tycoon, students will outfit their non-profit with the basic necessities and as in the real world, they need to pay for these basic necessities.
• Discuss as a class the benefits and downfalls of each way of obtaining money (don't forget to include the time it takes to obtain each type of money, i.e. writing and researching a grant).
• Why would anyone want to obtain a loan when a grant is "free money"? Include reasons for doing so that apply to the game as well as those that apply to real life (buying a house, etc.)

• The Types of Money Worksheet and the Grants and Loans Interest Rate Worksheet may be used to evaluate student work.

• Have the students sharpen their math skills and learn more about the eleven cities featured in karma tycoon by using the city demographic information to create a chart of percentages for the populations of seniors, young people and homeless people in each of the eleven cities. Take it a step further and have them create a population pie chart for each city to understand percentages graphically.

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