Many of our potential customers ask us how Aplia differs from Gold Simulation’s Beat The Market (BTM) Economics Simulation Game. Therefore we have highlighted the major differences between Aplia and Beat The Market.

Aplia is an educational technology company that offers online homework products for college-level economics. Aplia’s basic products for economics include online auto-graded problem sets and interactive experiments. Aplia’s problem sets are designed to complement specific textbooks from a variety of publishers. The interactive experiments by Aplia are for specific concepts such as: market equilibrium, price controls, and government regulations.

Gold Simulation’s BTM product provides online auto-graded problem sets, called exercises, and auto-graded interactive experiments, called games, that focus on topics relating to the four market structures: perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly.

The major differences between Aplia and BTM can be summarized by the following points:

1. Aplia does not offer simulation games which enable students to compete by making decisions to maximize profits in various market structures. BTM’s experiments focus on the theory of the firm, profit maximization, and topics including: demand, elasticity, production, costs, and revenues.
2. Aplia’s products are designed to fit specific textbooks. BTM’s exercises and games are designed to complement any standard economics textbook.
3. Aplia’s experiments cannot be adjusted to change the educational level of the simulation, whereas BTM has an “instructor controlled environment” which allows the instructor to specify the learning level from very simple to advanced levels.
4. Aplia’s experiments are designed to be played only once whereas BTM’s economic games are designed to be played any number of times. With BTM, there is a test mode that changes the parameters of each new game. This means the winning decisions change with each new game. Students can continue to learn by repeating a game any number of times.
5. Aplia includes some features that are not provided with BTM, including: math review tests and tutorials, and blogs tailored to typical first year course content.