Making the Gamification of Financial Literacy Work for Our Kids
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Remember when attending school meant sitting in a classroom with each child being expected to learn the same way? We wrote down our homework, handed it in to the teacher and waited for the assignment to be graded and returned. This one size fits all “old school” approach may be going the way of book straps and filmstrips. Technology can add the opportunity for instantaneous feedback and immediate adjustment.
Technology can now be tailored to compliment the individual child’s learning style. Some kids learn via verbal or pictorial illustration, some through kinetic and others through still different means. New technology can pick up on nuances that might otherwise slip through the cracks in traditional learning environments. I’m not suggesting replacement, merely that today, more than ever we have myriad ways to get through to our children and technology can play a vital part of the process.
This idea of using technology as a teaching tool is not novel, but in order to keep our students from merely living behind a screen, we have to take the lessons learned through technological means into the real world. Twenty-five years ago I wrote my first book, Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees,and since then I have devoted much of my career to making our youth more financially literate. Many books later, I needed a new way to connect with today’s kids. The fundamentals of the information I teach have not changed much in the past 25 years — the way we consume that information has changed.
