Goal Setting

Students can identify differences between long- and short-term goals and the importance of setting them.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Students can build goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

Task Analysis

Students can break down their goals into smaller tasks and create a plan using these tasks that will enable them to reach their goals.

Time Management and Scheduling

Students can schedule their time for the week and follow those schedules to work toward their goals.

A student’s choices shape their character’s story in Get a Life, a narrative-driven, college- and career-awareness game.

Guide a character from high school graduation to retirement. Decide what interest they will pursue and if they will continue in school. Then, navigate opportunities and obstacles. Balance their comfort, civic involvement, and income to make sure they lead a comfortable, satisfying life.

Dynamic play ensures nearly limitless storylines and outcomes, much like life.

Get a Life is designed and written to teach secondary school students about college and career options and encourage them to have conversations about their futures.

MYOB is designed to show students that the key to financial health is simple: Spend less than you make. Students are expected to set and follow a monthly budget and regularly monitor their checking and savings accounts while avoiding debt. However, students must balance their comfort level as well. In order to win the game, players must achieve and maintain the game goals for each scenario (such as savings, debt, and comfort goals) before time runs out.

MYOB contains ten scenarios, each dealing with different financial challenges and covering a mixture of financial literacy objectives. In each scenario, the player will earn a paycheck every four weeks. After they deposit their paycheck, they are prompted to set a budget for the next four weeks. Then they are free to determine how to spend their TIME, COMFORT, and MONEY, by choosing from any of the options on the screen, from paying bills to going shopping.

Every action the player takes in the game will impact their score in one of these three areas. If the player does not have enough time, comfort, or money to complete an action, the Perform button will be disabled. They will have to either choose a different action or perform an action that will give them enough resources to complete it.

Once the player has used all of the time points allotted for each four-week period, they will see a monthly summary, which provides feedback on their performance during that time. In order to win the game, the player must MEET or EXCEED the minimum SAVINGS REQUIREMENTS, DEBT REPAYMENT GOAL, and COMFORT LEVEL set out at the beginning of the scenario. Throughout the game, the player must strategically use their time, comfort, and money in order to achieve and maintain the scenario goals.

In the fall of 2021, students in Pseudoscience courses started creating this open educational resource (OER), which has been built upon by subsequent classes. Our intention is to create a free textbook for this course that might also be used by students of critical thinking elsewhere and of all ages, whether in a classroom or not. Our growing, interactive textbook employs the Paul-Elder Model and other critical-thinking resources, and is freely available to all, learners and educators alike.

The topic of pseudoscience offers a rewarding way for students to learn the value of thinking critically, even as they get to argue things, like Flat Earth Theory and astrology, that may seem trivial at first. At a time when truth is understood as largely subjective, we have, not surprisingly, seen a resurgence in the popularity of pseudosciences and conspiracy theories, which many consider to hold significant truth value, just as valid as physical evidence. It is our aim here to demonstrate the reasoned analysis process — weighing truth, belief, opinion, and fact — so that others may be able to replicate this process and reason through their own questions about vaccines, extra-terrestrials, genetic modification, or the first people to arrive in the Americas.