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Apps, websites use technology to teach kids about money BY ELIZABETH ROBERTS Talking about money may be taboo, but you would never know it, judging from the Internet. Online games teach toddlers to recognize and count money. Apps help teens budget for prom. It’s tempting to let media do all the financial education for you. Experts suggest resisting that temptation. A look through the offerings explains why: Most personal finance games and apps are stultifying. Practical Money Skills for Life, for example, is a website with a promising title run by Visa. It pledges to provide “high-quality personal finance materials … (to advance) the cause of financial literacy. A selection of tabs offers topics for grade schoolers through teenagers, but I don’t know a kid who would suffer through Peter Pig’s Money, a “game” for sorting coins. Older kids fare equally badly. Financial Football is a multiple choice quiz punctuated by random movements of virtual football players your child could have drawn. Road Trip to Savings has players maneuver through animated objects representing spending (a cheeseburger) and earnings; but in no time, I was thinking less about saving and more about avoiding what was in the path of my virtual car. Even Khan Academy, that trusted voice of clarity amid confusion, has a sleepinducing product, the main feature of which is a chalk board. Six hours later, I concluded good options exist, but finding the right one for you and your child will take some experimentation. One child may enjoy a virtual store. Another may enjoy dodging virtual financial pitfalls. I found two good and free places to start for kids ages 3-5: SesameStreet.org and Gotkidsgames.com/ pb/index.html, a free math game allowing players to recognize coins and add them up to $1. Exactly. Or the game starts again. The Sesame Street website has a primer on saving, spending and sharing, with Elmo as the instructor. Nine videos (including, perplexingly, a rendition of Ernie singing Rubber Duckie) show Elmo learning that work is how to earn money; money provides choices – buy flowers or ice cream; and saving provides more choices. In this case, getting a “Stupendous Ball,” means Elmo saves money in a
special jar until he has enough. Links for parents are less helpful, but they do include a “play money” printable and a printable of jar labels to teach kids how to divide their money into spending, saving and sharing. Apps are likely to be more relevant. A survey of 2,290 American parents found most children get their first tablet or cell phone by the age of 6. Any parent will tell you, moments later, it is a child’s favorite tool, friend and security blanket. So why not use it to advantage? A universally recommended app for younger children is Kids Money by Apps Rocket, available on iTunes. “Forbes” magazine calls it an “easy-to-use tool to teach arguably the most fundamental of all personal finance skills: Budgeting.” Kids pick a goal and log their progress toward it on the app. My son would have loved this. Instead of packing money into a jar, he could have walked to the bank where he has his account, made a deposit
at the ATM and recorded it on his phone. The free app tracks the goal – a $225 bicycle – and includes bar charts showing total earnings and the amount saved. My personal favorite? Bank of Mom. It isn’t free, but it is the next best thing to real life. The $1.99 iOS app offers families a virtual reward system. Kids earn credit on a virtual credit line by completing chores or making good grades. They can make a withdrawal from their “bank,” i.e. Mom (or Dad). Marketing materials point out the app has one other advantage: Kids can bank time. If hanging up clothes for a week earns $5, that credit can be exchanged for time spent with friends at the mall. But don’t discount old-fashioned board games. Pairing younger children with adults for a game of Monopoly will foster money counting skills as well as awareness of the perils of failing to save and insure those lessons come packaged in family values.
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3/23/16 12:35 PM