Digital Games and Edutainment for Financial Literacy

With just one-third of the world’s adult population being financially literate, it will take massive public-private efforts for the children of today to reverse this trend in the future. Realizing they have a high stake in financial education, bank and credit institutions are increasingly investing in gamified ‘edutainment’ targeted at young children and teenagers. I went to middle school in Stockholm in the late 1970s and the high point in my school week was the double period of home economics in a special classroom with several fully-equipped kitchen stations. (I must confess I raised my three children on the basic cooking skills I acquired between the age of 11 and 14.) And though I loved the class not for entirely the right reasons, in-between the professional make-up demonstrations and making delicious “sockerkaka” (sponge cake), spaghetti bolognese or scones, we also learned how to calculate the cost of a home-made dish, how to compare products and make informed purchase decisions, as well as the basics of money management – budgeting, saving, lending & borrowing.

As evidenced by the stats, the many decades of generously funded, early domestic and consumer science education have produced as many generations of financially literate citizens in Scandinavia. With a rate of 71%, Sweden and Denmark came up on top in the If as many as 3.5 billion adults have low financial literacy, what can we expect from the children?

Most countries that do provide free and obligatory education for all children are struggling with school maintenance costs and teacher salaries as it is, and those shiny Swedish cooking stations that I remember from 1979 and which made home economics class so engaging, are far beyond their means and priorities even in 2016.

Fortunately, we live in the digital age and have recourse to a cheap and widely accessible resource – the Internet. We also seem to have reached a general consensus that the task at hand calls for concerted and sustained efforts by all stakeholders – not just parents and teachers, but private bank and credit institutions, as well. Last but not least, we can now tap into the serious games & gamification know-how and best practices accumulated since the beginning of the 21st century.

Digital games for financial literacy

Game-based learning has long been recognized as an effective form of education and is highly valued as a compelling companion to classroom instruction, boosting interest and retention. Digital games are the medium that digital natives know and love best and can be the most straightforward way to engage and motivate them.

Owing to curriculum and financial constraints, however, school systems are unable to take on edugame development. Ideally, it would be funded and implemented within public-private partnerships to ensure broadly inclusive access. Here is a sample of projects aimed specifically at children and teens and sponsored by financial institutions such as Visa, Canada’s Meridian credit union and Singapore’s OCBC Bank and DBS Bank, in partnership with various public organizations and game developers.

Innovating the financial education ball game: VISA’s Practical Money Skills platform For more than a decade, VISA has been leading the way with its financial literacy program and web platform, Practical Money Skills for Life, which provides a vast range of content and tools designed for children, teens, college students and educators, including games and apps, downloadable wallpapers, worksheets, lesson plans, info packets, and even Spiderman and Avengers-themed comic books.

I know most of you would ask me how you can to teach your kids in a more easier and fun way. The simple answer is to read a book, there are plenty of children's book series about money available.