National Budget Simulation Game for Classrooms

Why it works in a classroom

A national budget simulation game works in class for the same reason case studies work in law school: it forces a decision. Students cannot answer “it depends” and move on. They have to pick measures, add up the billions, and then explain why they cut a hospital budget rather than raise a tax on the people who could most easily pay it.

The format suits a single lesson or a two-lesson sequence. It needs no software installation, no accounts and no preparation beyond opening a browser, which removes the usual friction that kills a good lesson idea between Monday and Friday.

It also produces disagreement immediately. In our experience of classroom play, the argument starts around minute twenty, when the first group discovers that its package balances the books but has already spent all its political capital — and that February is a long way from December.

The practical barrier to teaching public finance is that everything is either too abstract or too political. A textbook chapter on deficit arithmetic is abstract; a news debate about pensions is political. A simulation sits in between: it is concrete, and while the choices are political, the student makes them rather than inheriting them from a columnist.

What students actually learn

The learning outcomes are concrete and mostly quantitative, which makes them easy to assess.

• The difference between a deficit (a yearly flow) and debt (an accumulated stock).
• How to express a budget gap as a percentage of GDP, and why comparisons use percentages.
• How spending measures differ from revenue measures in size, speed and political cost.
• Why the order of decisions matters when resources — money and political capital — are limited.
• How borrowing costs interact with credibility, through the bond yield.
• Why trade-offs are unavoidable: every euro spent has an owner and an opportunity cost.
• How to defend a package under questioning, which is where the economics becomes argument.

A 60-minute lesson plan

The following sequence fits a standard lesson and needs only a projector and one device per pair or per group.

The timing is a guide, not a rule. With a lively group the comparison segment will run long and the debrief short, and that is fine, because the argument is the learning. With a quieter group, keep the play segment short and lean on the debrief, using the exit ticket as the assessment artefact.

Most teachers find that the twenty-to-thirty-five minute window is where the lesson actually happens.

• 0–5 minutes — The brief. Give students the starting position: a €54bn hole, a deficit at 5.9% of GDP, a target below 3% and a debt ratio that must fall.
• 5–10 minutes — Vocabulary. Define deficit, debt, GDP, bond yield and popularity before anyone clicks.
• 10–20 minutes — First decisions. Groups set the January mandate and pick their opening measures.
• 20–35 minutes — Play two or three months. Let them experience the consequences rather than describing them.
• 35–45 minutes — Compare packages. Two groups present: what they cut, what they raised, what it cost them.
• 45–55 minutes — Debrief with real numbers. Put their deficit number next to the official data.
• 55–60 minutes — Exit ticket. One paragraph: which decision would you take back, and why?

The two-lesson version: play, then debate

If you have two lessons, split the work. Lesson one is play: groups run a season and record their final deficit, debt ratio, popularity and survival status. Lesson two is a parliament simulation in which each group defends its package and the class votes on one.

The debate is where the economics becomes visible. Groups that cut aggressively have to explain the distributional consequences. Groups that raised revenue have to explain why the taxes will not simply reduce activity. Groups that did neither have to explain how they intend to hit 3%.

Teachers of civics, economics, mathematics and politics have all used this structure: the same artefact supports very different learning objectives.

One useful trick is to give each group a different profile, so the class produces several different mandates from the same starting numbers. The debrief then becomes comparative rather than absolute, which removes the temptation to hunt for a single right answer and makes the trade-offs visible in the room.

Assessment: what to mark

The game produces numbers, but the assessment should weight the reasoning. A simple rubric with four criteria works well.

A written justification of around 300 words is usually enough to see whether a student understood the constraint or merely reported the numbers. Look for the sentence that explains what they chose not to do, and why. That sentence is where the economics lives, and it is almost never the sentence a student writes first.

• Arithmetic accuracy — did the package actually close the gap it claimed to close?
• Trade-off analysis — can the group explain what it chose not to do, and why?
• Use of evidence — are claims compared with the official figures from INSEE, Eurostat or the CBO?
• Justification — is the distributional choice argued rather than asserted?

Benchmark the game against real numbers

The value of a simulation multiplies when students check it against reality. France’s general government deficit was 5.8% of GDP in 2024, or €168.6bn, and its public debt stood at around 113% of GDP. Those figures come from national accounts published by INSEE, and equivalent series exist for every EU country through Eurostat.

In the United States, teachers often benchmark against Congressional Budget Office projections, which is also the data behind The Fiscal Ship, built by the Brookings Institution and the Wilson Center. The Federal Budget Challenge, run by Next 10 and the Concord Coalition, has been used in American classrooms since 2009 and was designed for exactly this kind of comparison.

The point of the exercise is not that students replicate official forecasts. It is that they discover how narrow the space for manoeuvre really is once commitments, rules and politics are taken into account.

Group play, differentiation and access

Groups of two or three work best. One student can own the arithmetic, one the political consequences and one the presentation, and the roles can rotate in a second season so that everyone meets the red numbers.

For differentiation, assign the mandate in advance: less confident groups can be told to prioritise politically cheap measures, while stronger groups can be given a hard-mode dossier — an energy shock, a coalition collapse or a debt crisis — and asked to explain which assumptions broke first.

Access is not a barrier. The game is free, browser-based, needs no account, and both the English and Spanish interfaces are built in, which makes it usable in bilingual classrooms and in language lessons as well.

There is also a version of this activity that works without any devices at all. Print the catalogue of measures, hand each group a budget target, and let them negotiate on paper before anyone opens a browser. The game then becomes the follow-up: a way to test the package they built by hand against a world that reacts, amends, leaks and votes. Teachers who have run both versions tend to report that the paper-first, screen-second sequence produces the better debate, because students have already committed to a position before the feedback arrives and starts editing their opinion for them.

Before class: a practical checklist

Ten minutes of preparation covers everything the activity needs.

• Open the game once yourself and finish the January mandate; it takes ten minutes.
• Decide whether students play solo, in pairs or in groups, and how many devices you need.
• Project the five indicators so the whole room can see the same dashboard.
• Print or display the official figures you want students to compare against.
• Keep a spare machine or a shared device in case a browser misbehaves.
• Leave five minutes at the end for the exit ticket that turns play into evidence of learning.