1. What factors can lead to poverty?

The factors that lead to poverty are:

• Household: If you need to fix your house or something, it can cost a lot.
• Family: If your parents have no jobs, or you only have one parent, it’s a lot harder to live.
• Education: If you or your parents don’t have good education, they (or you) can’t get a good job.
• Health: If you live in an area with more pollution, you could get sick but have no money to get medicine or go to the doctor.

3. How can poverty affect succeeding generations?

It can affect succeeding generations because it’s really hard to get out of poverty. You might not get a good education, and then you can’t get a good job. If you every did anything bad to get food, like steal, you might have a bad reputation. Also you wouldn’t have that much money to get a new house or anything.

• As someone in this experience, tell your story.  Describe your experience. Tell us about the highs and the lows.  What were your major takeaways? What did you learn? How did you like it?  Be sure to explain your answers.

The unit was about an economy. We randomly picked jobs and chairs and then had to work to get checks and pay bills. I personally really liked the whole unit. I thought it was really fun and I really liked learning how to write and deposit checks. The only thing I didn’t like was when we picked our seats because I really wanted the couch but I ended up getting the crates which were still a cool seat. I liked how we could sit in other things rather than chairs.

• How did your character’s role/situation in the game affect your ability to take care of yourself?  Think about your income, job, rent, the amount of money you had, any loans you took out, and your health situation.

I think that my job was a very good job because it paid very well. I was a CEO so I got paid a lot and had really good health care. I had no trouble paying bills and didn’t get any diseases. I think I ended up with about $160,000 which was a lot of money.

• What aspects of your character’s life encouraged success?  What aspects of your character’s life brought about failure?  Explain how that process worked.

The aspect that encouraged the most success was that I was a CEO and got a lot of money, which definitely helped so I could easily pay my bills and rent and fines. The thing that encouraged failure was that one time I didn’t see someone charging a Chromebook. When I didn’t catch someone, I was fined $50, but when I caught someone, I got $10.

• What attempts did you make to improve your character’s life?  How successful were these attempts? How difficult were those attempts and why?

I tried to catch more people charging their Chromebook and I tried to be a little more sneaky so I could catch more people. This was difficult because everyone already knew that I could fine them so they were being careful. This didn’t work because I ended up never getting the money I was supposed to get from catching people.

• In bullet points, write a list of what you learned about poverty from this activity.  Be sure to include a brief description next to each item about what you learned, explaining your learning/thinking.

• How to write and deposit a check, we had to write and deposit checks to get paid and to pay people.
• What eviction is, we read about it and some people got evicted from their chairs.
• What the poverty line is, about 13,000 a year
• How much more  CEO gets paid than the average employee, 361 times more
• Things cost money, rent, bills, utilities
• Medicare vs Medicaid, both are different
• Diseases, some people had diabetes in the game