Character Education Fun & Games Middle/High School Secondary Elementary Social Studies Websites

Rags to Riches

What it is: Rags to Riches takes Lemonade Tycoon to a whole new level with simulated business.  In Rags to Riches, students are working to make their band a success.  Students play the part of a new band going on tour with a few new songs.  As they play the Rags to Riches game simulation, students must make decisions about what the band should do.  They have to decide which cities are best for them to play in, what venues to play, how much money to spend on publicity and how much to charge for tickets.  Students start out with $100 and must make wise decisions to continue in the simulation.  When they run out of money, the game ends and they must start again.

How to integrate Rags to Riches into the classroom: If you teach students like mine, breaking out Lemonade Tycoon in the classroom is met by cheers from some and with eye rolls by others who are “way too cool” for a lemonade stand.  For those students, Rags to Riches is in order.  The premise of the game is the same, but instead of selling lemonade, students are working to take their band to super star status.  This is a great game for teaching students about business, economics, and money.  This game is really best played in a computer lab setting where each student has access to their own computer, but if you don’t have that luxury, it could also be played as a class with an interactive whiteboard or projector-connected computer.  If you are playing as a class, give each student a roll in the band and set up rules together about how business decisions will be made.  After the simulation, come together as a class and talk about what decisions had the best outcomes and which led to downfalls.

Tips: Don’t hit your back button while you are in the simulation or your game will start over.  This is an important tip to pass on to students!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Rags to Riches in your classroom.

Founder of Anastasis Academy, The Learning Genome Project, 5Sigma Education Conference, tech integration specialist, instructional coach, writer, dreamer.

WebSite Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest

8 Comments

  1. I just tried this and I “didn’t make it.” It was still fun, though. I’m sure students would do much better than me!

  2. Thanks, Kelly! I just spent 20 minutes on this site…Great fun, and I can see lots of application for middle school kids! Now, if only we could get it to work on iPad…

  3. Hi
    I’m not familiar with Lemonade Tycoon. Can you direct me to it?
    Thanks for your great posts,
    adrienne

  4. This sounds similar to the course my colleague and I set up using Guitar Hero World Tour. It makes learning so much more exciting and lots of tasks can be literacy and numeracy based.

  5. Hi,
    I just ran across this post and can’t seem to link to the game. Is it still up?
    Thanks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *