Four students from Blandford Elementary School were honored recently at the Georgia Stock Market Game Awards Luncheon in Atlanta.

Emma Carroll, Dylan Hill, Diya Patel and Vanessa Vance — all fourth-graders at BES — received awards as regional winners in the Georgia Stock Market Game during the 2013-14 school year. Carroll and Patel won during the fall, and Hill and Vance won in the spring competition.

Vanessa Denison’s fourth-grade class at Blandford Elementary participated in the Georgia Stock Market Game, along with more than 35,000 students in public and independent schools statewide.

Elementary through high school students play the Stock Market Game each spring and fall semester for 10 weeks. They start with a hypothetical portfolio of $100,000 and research publicly-traded companies on the Internet, read business publications and crunch the numbers to select stocks.

The team from each region with the highest portfolio value at the end of 10 weeks wins.

The Stock Market Game is used by teachers across Georgia and the U.S. to demonstrate how the private enterprise system works and how the laws of economics unfold in the real world. Students learn that the lessons of market economics sometimes can be costly.