CREDIT GAMES
Credit Jones and
the Quest for Creditina:
A Credit Score Adventure
Learning outcomes
Identify the 5 factors that make up a FICO credit score and how heavily each one actually counts
Tell the difference between everyday habits that help a credit score and ones that quietly hurt it
Practice real credit decisions — how much to spend, when to apply for new credit — before they show up on an actual credit report
Walk away with a clear, personal next step for building or repairing their own credit
Credit scores feel like a locked vault most people are never handed the combination to — a single number, built from rules nobody explains, that quietly decides what you pay for a car, an apartment, or a mortgage. Credit Jones and the Quest for Creditina turns that mystery into a treasure hunt. Teams follow an Indiana-Jones-style adventurer through five guarded trials — one for each real FICO factor — solving a different challenge at each stop. Every trial solved earns a piece of the story's medallion and a digit of the final vault code. Crack all five, and the team claims the prize — along with a real answer to the question: what's actually driving my score?
Credit Committee:
Approve, Deny,
or Something in Between
Learning outcomes
Read and interpret a credit snapshot the way a real lender would
Practice weighing multiple, sometimes conflicting, credit factors at once instead of relying on a single score number
Understand that credit decisions are often a judgment call, not a pass/fail test
Walk away better prepared to read their own credit report and applications with real understanding
Most credit lessons teach the score. Credit Committee teaches the decision behind it. Students take a seat on a lending committee, reviewing real-feeling applicants — someone financing their first car, applying for an apartment, asking for a higher credit limit, or opening their very first card — armed with nothing but a credit snapshot: payment history, utilization, length of history, recent inquiries, and public records. Teams debate the case and land on a call — Approve, Deny, or Approve with Conditions. Several applicants are deliberately not clean-cut, because in real life, most credit decisions aren't either. It's the difference between memorizing what a good score looks like and actually understanding what a lender is weighing.
Credit Jenga:
Stack Your Score
Learning outcomes
Recognize which everyday financial behaviors help or hurt a credit score, and by roughly how much
Feel the asymmetry between slow credit-building and fast credit damage, not just hear it explained
Practice tracking and calculating a running score in real time
walk away with a gut-level sense of how real financial decisions ripple into a credit picture.
A credit score sounds abstract until you watch it wobble. Credit Jenga turns 50 real financial-life events — from paying a car loan on time to a mortgage default — into a physical stacking game. Every player starts at a realistic 620. Pull a block, read the numbered event aloud, and adjust your score right there on the spot. Good habits build slowly, one steady block at a time — but a single bad pull, or a tower that comes crashing down, can undo a lot of careful work fast. It's one of the fastest ways to make an abstract number feel like something real: built one decision at a time, and lost just as quickly.