Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Finally, I’ve found a spreadsheet application (Gnumeric) with a reliable Solver for doing regressions. And it’s free. The only tricky part is that there’s no native port for Macs; you have to use a command line package manager to install it (I used Fink).
Gnumeric, however, seems to be an excellent tool for data analysis.
To get students a little more familiar with personal finance, we’re doing a little bank account simulation, and I created a little Excel program to make things a little easier.
It’s really created for the class where students can come up to the bank individually, and the banker/teacher can enter their name and print out their checks as they open their account.
The front sheet of the spreadsheet (called the “Bank Account” sheet) has three buttons. The first, the “Add New Account” button, asks you to enter the student’s name and it assigns the student an account number, which is used on all the checks and deposit slips. The other two buttons let you delete the last account you entered, and reset the entire spreadsheet, respectively.
Once you’ve created an account the spreadsheet updates the “Checks and Deposit Slips” sheet with the student’s name and account number. If you flip to that sheet you can print out eight checks and five deposit slips, which should be enough to get you through the simulation. The checks are numbered and have the student’s account number on them.
There are two other sheets. One is the “Checkbook Register”, which is generic and each student should get one, and the other is called “Customer Balances”. The latter is set up so you (the teacher) can enter all the deposits and withdrawals the students make, and keep track of it all on the same page.
Yes, it’s a bit of overkill, but I though that, since I was going through the effort, I should probably do a reasonable job. Besides, it gave me a chance to do a little Visual Basic programming to keep my hand in. While I teach programming using VPython (see this for example, but I’ll have to do a post about that sometime) you can do some very interesting things in Excel.
Note: I’ve updated the Excel file.