Fun Microsoft Excel Stock Portfolio Mini Project

It is hard to find a fun way to introduce Microsoft Excel to students, as it is generally seen as "not fun" or "not relevant" to their lives.

With this project, students will be introduced to MS Excel by learning the basics about trading stocks, and by keeping track of their stocks on a daily, or weekly basis.

Students often become quite invested (no pun intended) in the project and they love to keep track of their stocks and update their stock portfolios to see how much money they earned or lost.

I have taught this lesson a number of times, and the students have loved it. Assessment will be determined by you, but it fits into the California State Standards for Technology for Middle School.

• Use spreadsheets to calculate, graph, organize, and present data in a variety of real‐world settings and choose the most appropriate type to represent given data
• Enter formulas and functions; use the auto‐fill feature in a spreadsheet application.
  

The research questions and reflection questions could be integrated into other areas of study, as needed.

This assignment can also be tied in with mathematics or statistics to determine the future growth of stocks etc.

The start of the project will take one to three lessons or more depending on your class length After your Excel Spreadsheets are set up, students can work on Vocabulary. PLEASE be aware that this project should "run in the background" meaning that you can move onto another project in Excel and just have the students update their stocks daily at the start of the lesson, or weekly depending on how you would like to run the lesson. Students will also calculate their profits or losses and report them to the teacher so that the students can see how their peers are performing. You can encourage students to also customize their Spreadsheets visually to better organize and understand their data more clearly.

I have included:

1. Two certificates: One can be used to put the student's name who got the highest earnings (or face) and the second can be awarded to the top investor.
2. Instructions for students to set up their Excel Spreadsheet
3. Research Questions
4. Reflection Questions
5. Vocabulary
   

The document is a PDF, so you can have students write out the questions and vocab. in a new document, or convert it to a Word document, if you wish.

Hopefully, you enjoy and your students do, as well. IF you do not have any knowledge about Excel or Stocks, no need to worry, just follow the instructions, and add feel free to add in personal experiences to share the risks or rewards of trading. Students should really understand the risk involved and the potential benefits.

I have my students update their stocks every second day for two weeks, and then I have them update at the end of the month going forward.