A lot of things work like this. Call it "the lucky chancer game." The winner is likely to be a fortunate risk taker, with a side effect of survivorship bias...

A lot of things work like this. Call it "the lucky chancer game." The winner is likely to be a fortunate risk taker, with a side effect of survivorship bias... the "wrong lesson." Two thoughts... First, it's not necessarily the wrong lesson. It teaches a real reality, and results could be interesting... especially if real money was involved. I can see why an accelerated game of "play the market" isn't what a schoolteacher wants to teach. But... if you did want to teach it, I would make the game high repetition. High risk-reward strategies and games are a real thing in the world. I don't think it's bad to learn how to play them. From the POV of playing such strategies/games, it's a short path to internalizing that "secret sauce" is generally an ingredient in a sequence, and therefore not really one thing. Second thought... One relevant way to teach kids about compound interest & saving is via "subsidized" interest rates. You might start with 10% per week with very young kids and recalibrate before financial meltdowns happen. This might be the way of getting your teacher friend's "right lesson" across. Anyway... That "just showing up" is surprisingly often the missing ingredient is also often true, and worth remembering. It just often isn't the ingredient for regular work/school life. We do "show up" for our school and work careers. That's the baseline. The reason, IMO, "just show up" is effective, where it is effective, is that most people don't show up. Everyone is showing up for work, for class. We do have something to show for it, it's not something that's an outlier.