The Bank of Phylgebrics

Main Entry: Fake Bank
Function: Noun
Definition: Fake banks hold fake money earned by project teams. Teams use the fake money to purchase materials for their projects.
Eatamology: Originally eaten out of Bert Bassett & Ruth Burrell brains (two very creative teachers from the first Think Forward Cohort). These teachers helped me to begin brainstorming this scheme while they were developing a similar point scheme for an integrated middle school math/ELA project. Since then, my co-teacher (Mr. Banks) and I have implemented the idea in our current project. We are developing tools and rules to manage the bank as we go along.
Date: November 5, 2009 to present

We were going to create fake money with Mr. Bank’s face on it because it’s a shame to not cash in on a name like Banks. Due to lack of time and our tendency to conserve paper whenever it is at all possible, we went with an online banking model. The Bank of Phylgebrics is a Google spreadsheet that is embedded into one of the pages of the Google site that holds our Rollercoaster project materials.

To protect students’ information, there are no individual grades or individual names in the Bank. Instead, the bank holds team names and team dollar deposits (these deposits are similar but in many cases different from the actual grades of the assignment/assessment scores generating the cash). Teams earn cash by completing team assignments and by helping individuals in their teams to submit individual assignments. All individual assignment scores are converted to cash via rules that involve team averages.

Teams lose points for not following classroom norms regarding tardies, materials maintenance, appropriate use of technology, respectful behavior, etc ... The tardy fees are motivating our students to apply positive peer pressure to get their peers into class on time and to live by classroom norms. The cleaning fees are keeping most of the work suites in our classroom in very good condition throughout the day. Even though the money is fake, being able to charge cleaning fees whenever I clean up work suites is very therapeutic for me. I did not go to graduate school to become a maid. Now I’m a part-time maid who makes a lot of fake cash – this is more fun than it sounds.

Teams use the fake money to buy materials. In phase one of the Rollercoaster project, our teams are buying marketing packages that they will use to sell their rollercoasters to teams in a different course at our school, PLTW Principles of Engineering (POE). Because our teams will not be given any face-to-face time with the POE teams, having a good marketing package is crucial to selling their rollercoaster designs. The bargain package allows teams to use text-only Google docs to market their designs. The standard package allows teams to use Google docs with text and pictures. The deluxe package allows teams to use Google docs or Google sites with text, pictures, and embedded simulations and videos.

Teams that succeed in selling their rollercoasters will earn a lot of fake money which they can use to buy the materials to build their prototypes. Also the rollercoasters that are selected by the POE project managers will be rendered in Autocad Inventor and will be built on an impressive scale by POE teams. These models will be mounted to the walls of one (or maybe two) of the POE classrooms.

Teams that fail to earn enough money to buy the cheapest package (bargain package) will go into fake debt and will be charged an overdraft fee (the overdraft idea is all Mr. Banks – it’s harsh but very real world).

Some of our teams are very motivated by the banking scheme. We list team balances in order of highest to lowest balances so the teams near the top are working very hard to stay within the top 5 or 10 teams. Some teams near the bottom are being much more assertive about going through processes that penalize (and eventually fire) non-contributing group members. I think this is happening because the fake budgets create fake stress. Since the grades are different from the budgets, it’s possible for students to earn A’s in the course based on their own efforts and still have very poor bank balances because team averages are being used to generate the balances.