Credit Jones and the Quest for Creditina:
A Credit Score Adventure
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
Credit Jenga: Stack Your Score
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?
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
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
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.
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.