15 Economics Courses for Middle School Students in Colorado
You deal with economic decisions every day, from deciding what to spend your money on to figuring out why something suddenly costs more. If you're a middle school student who wants to understand the reasoning behind these choices, an economics course can be a great place to start.
As a participant, you might run a simulated business, learn how international trade works, manage a budget, explore investing, or figure out how a product gets from an idea to a customer. Some programs use games and simulations, while others involve projects, mentors, and real business scenarios. You'll build skills in financial reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and analysing how different choices affect an outcome.
Why should I take an economics course in Colorado?
Colorado has some interesting opportunities for younger students to explore economics through practical experiences. Programs like JA Finance Park put students in simulated financial situations involving taxes, housing, banking, insurance, and spending, while International Towne lets students experience how trade, currencies, and global markets work.
An economics course can also give you a useful foundation for subjects you may study later, including business, finance, public policy, mathematics, and computer science. More importantly, you'll start learning how to look at a decision, understand the trade-offs, and explain why one option might make more sense than another.
To help you find the right opportunity, we've compiled 15 economics courses for middle school students in Colorado.
15 Economics Courses for Middle School Students in Colorado
Location: Virtual
Cost: Varies | Financial aid available
Acceptance rate/Cohort size: Highly selective
Application deadline: Varies based on cohort
Program dates: Eight weeks | Timing varies by cohort
Eligibility: Students in grades 6 to 8
Lumiere’s Junior Explorers Program is a selective online research experience for middle school students, designed to build advanced academic writing and research skills. You begin by selecting a subject area, such as STEM, humanities, or social sciences, and are matched with a PhD-level mentor from a top university. Over the course of the program, you receive a structured introduction to your chosen field, then design and carry out an independent research project focused on a real-world question. To strengthen your writing and analytical abilities, you conclude the program by producing a formal research paper that presents your findings.
Location: Virtual
Cost: Varies depending on program type. Full financial aid available.
Application deadline: Rolling deadlines. You can apply to the program here.
Program dates: 25 hours over 10 weeks (on weekends) during the spring cohort and 25 hours over 2 weeks (on weekdays) during the summer cohort.
Eligibility: Students in grades 6-8
The AI Trailblazers program by Veritas AI is a virtual program that teaches middle school students the fundamentals of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Over 25 hours, you will learn the basics of Python as well as topics like data analysis, regression, image classification, neural networks, and AI ethics. Students learn through lectures and group sessions with a 5:1 student-to-mentor ratio. Previous student projects have included building a machine-learning model to classify music genres and creating a machine-learning algorithm to provide a custom list of educational resources based on selected specifications.
Location: Junior Achievement Rocky Mountain, Greenwood Village & Thornton, CO (fully virtual and mobile options also available)
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Unspecified
Application Deadline: Not specified
Dates: Year-round school scheduling
Eligibility: Grades 6–8
JA Finance Park turns personal finance into a full-on decision-making simulation. After the classroom lessons, you'll step into a simulated adult financial life and make choices about income, taxes, housing, banking, insurance, investments, and everyday spending. You'll have to balance competing expenses and see how one financial decision can change everything else in your budget. Business and community volunteers take part in the simulation, giving you a chance to talk through those decisions as you go. The programme is a solid introduction to how money moves through households and the trade-offs behind financial planning.
Location: Junior Achievement USA (offered through local Junior Achievement chapters, including Colorado affiliates)
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Open-enrollment
Application Deadline: None (educators submit requests to schedule volunteer-led sessions on a rolling basis with local JA chapters)
Dates: Varies by local chapter and school schedule
Eligibility: Middle school students (ages 11–14; generally grades 6–8)
JA Economics for Success 2.0 starts with a pretty basic business question: what are your skills actually worth in the working world? You'll look at your interests, values, and abilities, then connect those choices to careers, income, spending, and financial priorities. Lessons cover earning money, managing expenses, budgeting, wants versus needs, and workplace expectations. The programme also gets into the economics behind everyday choices, showing how education and career decisions can affect what you earn and how you manage it. Depending on the school, the curriculum can lean more heavily into financial literacy, career readiness, or both.
Location: Young Americans Center for Financial Education - Cherry Creek (Denver, Colorado)
Cost: School group registration requires a non-refundable $250 deposit upon contract signing (credited toward the final per-student invoice); summer camp sessions are $250 per student
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Open enrollment for school groups (serves approximately 11,000+ middle school students annually)
Application Deadline: Rolling / first-come, first-served
Dates: School-year scheduling
Eligibility: Grades 6–8
International Towne takes you out of the classroom and into a simulated global economy. You'll learn how countries trade with one another, how currency exchange works, and why an import or export decision in one place can affect businesses somewhere else. The simulation brings in ideas such as credit, exchange rates, international trade, and global markets, so you're dealing with the same basic mechanics that businesses face when they operate across borders. Case studies and economic scenarios give you a chance to work through those decisions and see how interconnected markets can get.
Location: Junior Achievement-Rocky Mountain (delivered directly in middle school classrooms across Colorado and Wyoming)
Cost: Free of charge
Acceptance rate/cohort size: Open-enrollment
Application Deadline: None (educators submit program requests on a rolling basis throughout the school year)
Dates: Five teacher-led sessions plus one volunteer-led session, every 45 minutes
Eligibility: Middle school students in Colorado; requires teacher participation and access to a device for each student group to access the online simulation
JA Business Quest basically lets you run a tiny business and then throws problems at it. Using the online Profit Park simulation, you'll create a product, set up your business, invest money, choose a storefront, order inventory, and make decisions based on your budget. Then things get messy: material shortages force you to rethink your product, and the Worldwide Bazaar introduces international trade, new customers, trade partners, and even a natural disaster that disrupts the flow of goods and pushes up costs. One session also looks at how the global marketplace affects everyday life and what businesses have to consider when working internationally. It's a surprisingly hands-on introduction to pricing, operations, customers, property, inventory, and global trade.
Location: Virtual
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: 24 students total per cohort (12 students in grades 5–6 and 12 students in grades 7–8)
Application Deadline: Rolling
Dates: July 7 – 24 (tentatively)
Eligibility: Grades 5–8
Colorado Futuretek's STEAM! program mixes technology projects with the kind of problem-solving you'll see in entrepreneurship. You'll work in a small cohort with instructors, high school students, and college mentors on projects that require you to think through a problem, manage resources, and figure out how to make your idea work. The small group matters here: with only 24 students, you get more room to actually work through the projects with your mentors. Everything happens online, so you can take part from anywhere in Colorado while working on projects that connect technology, business thinking, and innovation.
Location: Denver Debate Club (in-person sessions in the Denver metro area, CO)
Cost: $450 (half-day track) / $800 (full-day track)
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Limited spots available
Application Deadline: Rolling / open until each weekly seminar reaches capacity
Dates: Multiple sessions from June to August
Eligibility: Grades 6–8
The Young Entrepreneurship Seminar gets into the mechanics of building a business: finding an opportunity, figuring out what people want, and pitching an idea. You'll work through business scenarios while practising how to explain and defend your decisions. The programme also looks at how markets work and how businesses compete. The Model UN component adds another layer, with students discussing economic and policy questions alongside the entrepreneurship work. So you might spend one session thinking like a founder and another thinking about how governments and economies shape the environment that businesses operate in.
Location: Colorado State University, Department of Design and Merchandising (Nancy Richardson Design Center, Fort Collins, CO)
Cost: Free of charge
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Approximately 32–38 students per summer cohort
Application Deadline: April 15
Dates: June 16 – 27
Eligibility: Rising grades 6–8
Fashion FUNdamentals looks at fashion as a business, not just something you wear. You'll explore how products are developed, what consumers want, and how production and global supply chains get a product from an idea to the customer. You'll also see how a design decision can affect production costs, demand, and the way a product performs in the market. CSU's Design and Merchandising faculty bring those ideas into hands-on projects that mix design, technology, consumer behaviour, and entrepreneurship. If you like fashion but also want to understand the business behind the clothes, this is where the two start to overlap.
Location: Junior Achievement-Rocky Mountain, Inc. (JA Free Enterprise Center, Greenwood Village, CO)
Cost: $25 registration fee + $250 program fee; need-based scholarships available
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: 10:1 student-to-staff ratio
Application Deadline: Rolling / open until camp capacity is reached
Dates: June 15 – 19
Eligibility: Students entering grades 6–8
At JA Youth Trailblazers, you'll spend a week playing with the basic pieces that make a business work. Activities cover starting a business, figuring out what customers need, making financial choices, and thinking about different career paths. The programme uses simulations and group projects, so you're making decisions and seeing what happens rather than just reading definitions of terms like revenue or budgeting. The camp is held at the JA Free Enterprise Center, with Junior Achievement staff leading the sessions and keeping the focus on entrepreneurship, money, and the workplace.
Location: Youthentity (headquartered in Carbondale, CO; delivered in classrooms across Colorado
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Open-enrollment school curriculum reaching 6,000–8,000+ students statewide each year
Application Deadline: Rolling basis throughout the school year
Dates: Offered throughout the year
Eligibility: Students in grades 5–12 (participating through partner schools and community groups
Youthentity gets straight into the money questions you'll eventually have to deal with: how to budget, save, use credit, invest, and plan for bigger expenses. Its workshops connect those financial decisions to education, careers, and the industries students may eventually enter. You'll also hear from industry professionals, so the lessons aren't limited to what a textbook says about money. Some programmes bring in local employers and career information too, giving you a chance to connect financial planning with actual jobs and career paths across Colorado.
Location: Teen Business Academy (in-person sessions in Colorado Springs and Denver, CO, with virtual options)
Cost: Free for eligible Colorado homeschool families
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Open enrollment on a first-come, first-served basis
Application Deadline: Rolling enrollment
Dates: Ongoing programming
Eligibility: Teenagers; middle school eligibility may vary by program
Teen Business Academy takes you through the less glamorous, but very real, parts of running a business. You'll work on business plans, marketing, sales, branding, operations, customer development, and financial management, with entrepreneurs teaching the coursework. The interesting part is that you're encouraged to take a business idea beyond the planning stage and test it in a real setting. That means thinking about who would actually buy your product, how you'd reach them, what you'd charge, and how you'd keep the business running. The programme is built as longer-term business education, so you have more time to develop an idea than you would in a one-week entrepreneurship camp.
Location: Young Entrepreneurs Academy
Cost: Varies by local chapter
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Limited cohort model
Application Deadline: Varies by chapter
Dates: Academic-year programming
Eligibility: Students ages 11–18
Young Entrepreneurs Academy takes a business idea from the "what if?" stage to something you can actually pitch. You'll work through idea generation, business planning, branding, financial planning, marketing, and operations while getting feedback from business and entrepreneurship mentors. As your idea takes shape, you'll also have to explain the numbers and make the case for why the business should exist. The programme finishes with venture-development and presentation activities, giving you a chance to put your business plan in front of people who can question it.
Location: Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, CA (Fully Virtual/Online)
Cost: Application fee: $100 (non-refundable, no waivers); Blue Cohort Tuition: $2,000 (covers class material, instruction, student subscription for learning tools, UC campus fees, bank fees, credit card fees, third-party system, and administrative fees)
Acceptance rate/cohort size: Unspecified
Application Deadline: Unspecified
Dates: September 13 – November 19
Eligibility: 6th-8th graders; requires computer meeting Zoom and Canvas minimum requirements; must have access to Zoom and Canvas for virtual learning; no prerequisite business knowledge required
B-BAY's Middle School Discovery Program brings AI into the business classroom. You'll look at how artificial intelligence is changing industries, then work on your own AI-related solution to a real-world problem. The Business Model Canvas becomes your framework for turning that idea into something more concrete: who has the problem, what you're offering, and how the business could actually work. You'll also examine global challenges and build solutions through interactive online sessions with other middle school students. It's a neat combination of AI, entrepreneurship, and the basic question every business has to answer: does this idea actually solve something?
Location: Fully virtual
Cost: Free trial available; subscription pricing varies
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Open enrollment
Application Deadline: None
Dates: Self-paced, year-round access
Eligibility: Ages 8–18 (including middle school students)
KidVestors turns financial literacy into games, simulations, and investing challenges. You'll learn about stocks, business ownership, budgeting, economics, saving, risk, and wealth-building while making decisions inside interactive activities. The entrepreneurship side also lets you think about what it means to own a business and how money moves through it. Because the course is self-paced, you can jump between topics, revisit a lesson, or spend more time on something like investing or budgeting. It works across desktop, tablet, and mobile, so the whole thing can sit alongside your regular schoolwork.
Stephen is one of the founders of Lumiere and a graduate of Harvard College, where he earned an A.B. in Statistics. He founded Lumiere as a PhD student at Harvard Business School. Lumiere is a selective research program where students work 1–1 with a research mentor to develop an independent research paper.