Standing Bear students learn about economics of sports gambling

April 2, 2025

Standing Bear High School students focused their attention on sports gambling this spring by viewing the topic through the lenses of personal finance, economics and human behavior.
 
Dozens of Grizzlies took part in an interactive lesson called “Beyond the Bet: The Economics of Gambling” in their World of Business classes. Nebraska Council on Economic Education (NCEE) Associate Director Matt Pierson spent 45 minutes teaching them about the social and financial impacts of sports gambling, the probability of making successful bets and how the activity affects human decisions.
 
Standing Bear student Kate said she learned a lot from Pierson’s presentation. She said it was interesting to know that gambling takes place throughout society. Card games at casinos, fantasy sports leagues, stock market purchases, lottery tickets, wagers on outcomes of basketball games and bets on 50/50 drawings can all be considered forms of gambling.
 
“I really liked the lesson,” Kate said. “I thought it was cool how he brought in interactive things that we could do, and I thought it really showed how there’s so much into gambling.”
 
Classmate Payton said the lesson helped him become more aware of sports gambling. He has filled out March Madness brackets and signed up for fantasy football drafts because of the fun nature of both activities.
 
“Sometimes it can be good and sometimes it can be bad. It’s not always the same,” Payton said. “It just depends on who the person is.”
 
Pierson spent approximately one year developing the three-lesson unit, which has received national acclaim for its evenhanded and in-depth approach to the topic. He presented the award-winning curriculum at the 2025 National Association of Economic Educators (NAEE) Spring Conference, and he also shared it at Nebraska business, marketing and information technology conferences this past fall. The free lessons are accessible to thousands of teachers across the country under the education section of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website.
 
Pierson said introducing students to concepts like risk, incentive, and opportunity has become more important with the increased number of gambling websites and businesses available to consumers. Teenagers are also able to access gambling sites through their smartphones and other new technological devices.
 
“The more I talk to high school students, I’ll just ask them, ‘Hey, are you gambling?’ And once they realize that I’m not here to turn them into any authority or anything like that, usually a good percentage of them have done some sort of activity that falls under gambling,” Pierson said. “I think especially with it becoming more active on the phones too, they’re able to make bets from their couch, using their brother’s account or using their friend’s account or whatever it may be. I think it’s really, really important to hit that in high school.”
 
One of the lesson’s main goals is to teach students the mathematical reasons why gambling is unpredictable. Pierson asked Standing Bear volunteers to complete five sports-themed activities in front of the class. Kate tried to kick as many small wads of paper as she could through the legs of a chair, which mimicked soccer, and Payton played a baseball game that involved hitting crushed pieces of paper above a line on the wall.
 
Before Kate and Payton started their first round, students wrote down guesses of how many times they would succeed in making soccer goals or hitting home runs. After watching them complete the first round, their classmates then made new guesses of their second-round totals. Only five to ten percent of the class guessed the exact second-round number each time.
 
“I think a lot of them are surprised that they can’t predict it, especially the second time,” Pierson said. “The second time I like to reiterate to them, ‘Well, you’ve already seen it. Same person, same everything.’ You know how many they’re going to get, and they still can’t predict it. I think that makes it a little more real to them, like, ‘Oh yeah, I can’t predict these things.’”
 
Kate said it also gave her a firsthand perspective of how sports gambling can potentially affect collegiate and professional athletes. After she scored three goals in her second round, she heard people asking her to change her behavior so they could win the guessing game. Pierson then shared several examples of athletes who had received angry threats from gamblers for not collecting enough touchdowns, rebounds or digs.
 
“I definitely heard people shouting at me to stop and telling me to do one more and stuff,” Kate said. “Obviously, I was in a very low-pressure situation, but even that kind of affected me a little bit, so I just know that people in really high-pressure types of situations, like major league and stuff, they probably experience that a lot more than I did.”
 
Pierson said he has enjoyed helping high school students view sports gambling through more-educated lenses in their business, finance and human growth classes.
 
“With March Madness going on and just being in the middle of that, sports betting is obviously going to be a huge topic for people,” Pierson said. “Getting to speak to high school students about that, who are for sure at least exposed to it and some are participating in it, and getting to talk about real life with them a little bit is really a great opportunity.”
 
Visit the Nebraska Business Focus Program at Standing Bear High School webpage at business.lps.org to learn more about this learning opportunity with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Business. LPS teachers and Nebraska Business professors lead students in pre-pathway and early college and career pathway courses.
 
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