Every year, hundreds of students walk through Bingham High School’s media center in awe of the dozens and dozens of gingerbread homes and structures that are made as an option for the mathematics in personal finance class. 

There are red barns, tree houses, football stadiums, the house from the movie “Up,” a Hogwarts house from the Harry Potter book series, a miniature Rockefeller Center, as well as two scaled-down Bingham High Schools. This year, they ranged from a simple school-sized milk carton gingerbread cabin to a replica of the Washington National Cathedral that measured several feet wide and high.

“We were given the challenge to make a gingerbread with the guidelines that it had to be mostly edible, and it had to fit through the school doors, so we decided to make it as big as possible,” said senior Ethan Williams, who created the cathedral with Namoa “Mo” Tuikolongahau and James Southworth. “We added the sides once we got it inside.”

While Williams is the only one of the three who has been to the second largest cathedral in the United States, the others, who were thinking Taj Mahal or the St. Basil’s Cathedral, agreed. 

“I knew we were going to make it big, but not this big,” said Tuikolongahau about the first gingerbread structure he’s made.

It took the trio less than a dozen days to complete the project, from planning, to making the intricate structure and moving it into the library, where it sat alone on a table as it was too large to be placed on top of a bookshelf with other students’ creations. They finished the project a week before it was due.

The scaled-down cathedral was supported by wood, supplied by Williams’ dad, who is a contractor. His son, who has worked with him on some projects, was the one to make the calculations for the gingerbread church.

After building the cathedral’s frame, they covered it with cardboard so the graham crackers would stick better.

The boys bought nine large boxes of graham crackers and used “just under 1,000” of them. 

“Graham crackers were cheaper and lighter than gingerbread,” Tuikolongahau explained. “I did the details; they gave me ideas and I just went for it. I learned teamwork. Teamwork makes the dream work.”

The structure is coated with about 40 pounds of candy, and Williams’ mother’s mixer stopped working as 30 pounds of royal icing was made to decorate the replica of the church that is built in the shape of a cross.

Southworth said there wasn’t too much difficulty involved.

“When it comes to detail, it’s a lot easier on these big ones,” he said. “The towers got a little bit tricky though.”

Southworth designed the stained-glass windows, but Tuikolongahau said they tweaked the design to use pretzels in support of the melted colorful Jolly Rancher hard candies. 

Gumdrops lined the roof near the powdered sugar-coated ice cream cone spires with Sixlet candies placed on top of the towers. Three gingerbread boys, representing the teens, stood on vanilla wafer stairs as if to walk out of the cathedral and into the marshmallow trees representing the Olmstead Woods on the 59-acre grounds.

Marc Jensen teaches eight periods of about 250 students in the year-long class that covers 16 different units including the cost of housing, rentals and mortgages. It counts as a finance, math or an elective class credit.

“We talk about how a mortgage works, housing trends, the values of houses and what impacts that, and how much of our budget we should use on housing,” he said, adding that at the end of the unit, students are given a quiz to assess their learning as well as an optional project that is designed to supplement their learning. 

For this unit, students choose to write an essay on questions to ask when buying a house; put together an amortization table revealing the advantages of a 10-year mortgage as compared to a 30-year mortgage; or create

a gingerbread structure.

“I give them a chance to kind of showcase what they learned, go in a little bit deeper and do it in a way that they want to,” Jensen said, adding the majority pick the gingerbread creation. “Every project is scored for participation; there’s no grading as far as how good the house is. For fun, teachers vote for a winner and the top 25 of the gingerbread creations.”

He said the top vote-getters get a little bonus of pretend income in the nine-month “Miner Money Madness” game they play, where students have a budget to manage.

He said the gingerbread house idea came about from the unit they study during the holidays.  

“I thought it would be fun with toothpicks and straws and gummy bears, the typical engineering type stuff, but it was one of the students, probably 15 years ago, who suggested to make a gingerbread house. I love seeing kids’ creative juices come out a bit,” he said, adding that the choice of assignments gives every kid an opportunity to show their different strengths. “I want them to know the basics about a mortgage, the basics of what house values are, the basics of what to look for when they purchase a house, right? More than it has a cool couch and a cool TV.”

While Jensen said the Washington National Cathedral and other creations are beautiful, there is more behind the option.

“They may be making a gingerbread house and ask Mom and Dad, ‘do we have a 20-year or 30-year mortgage and why did we do what we did?’” he said. “In the springtime, when we talk about purchasing cars, we may have kids who are really good at auto body or diesel mechanics, and they will go above and beyond on the supplemental project we do for that. I try to let the students have some fun and see if I can grab their interest and tie it to the educational education we’ve learned. We also do a unit on emergency preparedness and their project is to put together a 72-hour kit. I don’t ask them to buy a $300 kit or put one together for themselves that cost $50. All I ask is if they learned and did something for emergency preparedness. When we talk about taxes, students will fill out a fake tax return. This class is about the finances of your life.”

It’s all incorporated into the game where they roll a die to see if they will marry or divorce, have children or need to pay child support, if they go to college or have a second job.

“Every Friday kids pay their bills and account for their weekly expenses,” Jensen said. “They decide whether they pay off their college loan a little bit this week or if they invest in a stock. They’re learning what tax rates are and what gross income is and what our leftover money is. They literally are in charge of how much money they earn, and the kids get kind of competitive. They want to be the richest one in class.”

Senior Ashton Clarke said he took the class as his older siblings told him they’ve applied what they learned to real life.

 

“Thinking about managing your finances, it can be overwhelming,” he said. “But throughout the whole year, we play a game of Life. Every week we pay bills, we learn to budget, and learn about insurance and mortgages,” he said.

His classmate senior Matt Philbrick agrees.

“The class helps you be more prepared and less nervous about life after graduation when you’re an adult and having to worry about rent and car payments,” he said. “I didn’t know much about stocks and mortgages and houses, which sound like big scary things. But through the class game, I’ve learned to understand and it’s not as intimidating. One thing we learned in this class is that the time to invest is early, let compound interest take over and not to spend your money away. I plan to look into opening up a Roth IRA account. I didn’t know anything about compound interest or certain types of savings accounts before.”

Senior Tessa Densley is learning about life’s financial decisions.

During the first week of the game, she rolled the die to learn she divorced her spouse “who makes lots of money.” A later roll on another week meant she remarried the same person, bringing the end of child support for their five kids.

“It’s been good to learn things like keeping our monthly mortgage payments under 30 percent of our gross income or if we put down an 80 percent down payment on a house, we don’t have to pay a PMI (private mortgage insurance),” she said. “It helps us establish our goals and know how to reach them. I want to work for NASA, and it’s made me think more about my future besides college and scholarships. I need to look at who and when I may marry as that is going to have a huge financial decision and what house I’m in besides what I do for work so I know how I will pay for things. It’s been beneficial because we have been learning stuff that I know I’ll use outside of school.”

As each student navigates through the game, they have a chance to earn extra money. Many students do it through challenges such as going to bed by 10 p.m., doing homework or attending a high school activity. They’ve exercised, read books, practiced hobbies, given up drinking soda pop, and “do healthy things that teenagers should develop as habits that lead to more productive lifestyles,” Philbrick said.

While they’re projecting their future lives in the game, they’ll be thrown a curve ball and face a depression, Jensen said.

“I try to make this applicable to real life and not knowing what may happen and this depression will also teach them that money value can fluctuate,” he said. “I want them to think, ‘where do we go from here’ and never spend more than they make, know how to save, and understand some of the biggest financial and planning decisions they’ll make in life.”