In this undated photo provided by the Iola Register, a team of Iola Middle School seventh-graders, from front left, Conner Sigfusson, Eli Battles and Tristin Seelye, and in back, Garrett Tomlinson and Jeremy Spears, play an education stock market game on a computer. The group has more than 200 teams in Kansas.

IOLA ? Two months ago, Eli Battles didn’t know the difference between a trend line and a hemline.

Now, the Iola Middle School seventh-grader knows that a trend line is a stock market term and that when the line consistently is headed upward it’s a good thing. A hemline? Well, he is a boy and he does notice girls.

Battles and others who report daily to Roger Carlin’s social science classroom at IMS are taking a hands-on approach to learning about the stock market by making phantom purchases. Carlin means to use the current financial madness as a source for lessons, including how President Obama’s stimulus package and other fiscal policies affect not only the market but also American society.

Daily life in game form

Students watch the markets to see how stocks respond to external stimuli, such as news stories about Citibank or Detroit’s Big 3 automakers or banks going belly up. The daily news has taken on new meaning for the students.

Putting the lessons in game form is a fun way to pique the students’ interest, Carlin said. The game aspect is a statewide project through the Kansas Council on Economic Education, with headquarters in Wichita. Enrollment cost is $10 per team.

“We had 20 teams (involving all 93 seventh-graders at the middle school) and I didn’t think we’d get to participate in the statewide contest,” which has click-of-a-mouse reports on how the 200-plus teams statewide are faring, Carlin said.

The cost, $200 for 20 teams, was prohibitive. Carlin then got a call. Someone in Wichita picked up the tab for the IMS teams, and they were in.

Game scenario

On a recent afternoon, an IMS team was leading the state, and had for several days. The five members had parlayed $100,000 (in mock money) into $132,000. Another Iola team was second.

“That can change in a matter of minutes,” Carlin said, giving the students a clear understanding of how fortunes can be made and lost at the whim of global finances.

The game has rules.

Team members may not invest in stocks when they dip under $5 a share and they are restricted to mainline issues. They don’t trade in commodities, although the high-flying IMS team made a good deal of its money on a gold stock.

During the time the team had possession of the stock, it got as high as $113 a share when gold, in commodity form, soared to $1,000 an ounce. More recently it was just above $900, its influence as a hedge investment slipping as Wall Street regained strength.

Carlin has used the stock market game to encourage and tutor students for several years. Five years ago a team of Seth Walden, Kent Toland and Molly Riebel, all seniors today at Iola High School, won the state title. They capitalized on the meteoric rise of Google to turn a fictional nest egg into a fortune.

Carlin said his instruction went beyond the reaction of the stock market to national and international events. He also wants his students to learn how to trade stock and how such things as interest rate changes affect the market.

He makes money, albeit also fictional, from the game the students play, an aspect that adds realism.