Re: [seul-edu] Math teachers...

[Jacques Fortier <jfortier@seul.org>]

I've been away from my email for a while, which is why I'm a bit late
getting onto this thread.  Yes, I have written a stock market simulator
which runs in linux.  For those who are too lazy to check out the link and
sign up, it basically allows you to buy and sell securities (not just
stocks) with "funny money".  It's sort of tied to Yahoo Finance
(finance.yahoo.com) because there are some handy perl modules that let you
automatically get stock quotes from Yahoo, and Yahoo has a huge database
of company information (earning, news links, etc, etc).  It differs from
Viral's in that while my simulator provides a gateway into the real stock
market, Viral has actually created a simulator that allows you to make a
fake stock market, which would naturally contain fake stocks.
    My system is available at <http://stocks.seul.org>.  It's web based,
using the fairly standard combination of MySQL and PHP, with a bit of perl
and C glueing everything together.  I haven't made an actual distribution,
but if someone wants to implement their own server, I'd be happy to help,
although I really need to do some work to make it easier to administrate.
    I like the idea of integrating lessons investing into seulStocks.
Unfortunately, I can't get through to the InvestSmart website, so I can't
see what they have to offer.  Unfortunately, my knowledge of the stock
market consists of "Buy low, sell high", "You can lose your shirt in
derivatives", and, from my dad, "Mutual funds are for wimps".  If someone
were willing to help with the content side of things, I'd be happy to try
to do something.  I'd also love to get ideas for other ways in which my
simulator can be extended.

    Jacques

> Chris Hobbs wrote:
> 
> > This gets back to something that struck me yesterday - the biggest
> > benefit to buying "Educational" software is probably not the
> > software/code itself, but the canned lesson plans and other supporting
> > materials that come with it. That's what impressed me the most about the
> > InvestSmart Stock Market Game
> > (http://library.thinkquest.org/10326/market_simulation/index.html) I
> > came across yesterday - coding a stock market game doesn't seem like
> > it'd be all that difficult (i.e. I could probably do it :).
> 
> Two things here.  If it's of any interest, SEUL has two (!) stock market
> simulators under our wing, one by Jacques Fortier <http://stocks.seul.org>, and
> one by Viral Shah <http://casts.seul.org>.  Jacques, I don't think Viral is on
> this mailing list; could you contact him and see if you guys can put these two
> projects together?  If not, that's OK, but it would be nice to see a good stock
> market sim get developed.
> 
> There's a site on the web called Lesson Plans <http://www.lessonplans.org> that
> has a number of links to downloadable lesson plan archives.  It definitely would
> be a good idea for some of us to go through these links and see if we can find
> any help in developing lesson plans to use free software.  This would go a long
> way toward addressing Chris's points.
> 
> --
> Doug Loss                 God is a comedian playing
> Data Network Coordinator  to an audience too afraid
> Bloomsburg University     to laugh.
> dloss@bloomu.edu                Voltaire
> 
>