Crypto can help teach kids about personal finance

Being financially literate means understanding how skills like money management, budgeting, and investing can be used to make effective financial decisions. The sooner these skills are adopted in life, the greater the number of opportunities to accumulate wealth. Unfortunately, the education system is severely lacking in the financial education and application skills we need to succeed, and we are still learning how this affects the economy on a larger scale.

Switching service providers and deciding on the best mortgage rates: These are the kinds of decisions most people will encounter. But not fully understanding how it all works can cost a significant amount of money, according to a new study. investigate. The National Financial Educators Council (NFEC) found that, on average, American adults estimated they lost $1,634 in 2020 due to a lack of money management skills. Extrapolating these figures, a lack of knowledge cost the citizens of the United States approximately $415 billion in 2020.

Given that in 2018 respondents estimated an average loss of $1,230 for that calendar year, this suggests that an increasing number of people are missing out on building a financially stable future. With Web3 and crypto becoming more and more popular with the next generations, teaching children proper financial and financial application skills becomes even more important.

Learning financial education with crypto

Many hope that the rise of digital currencies can eventually help solve the growing problem of money mismanagement on both an individual and institutional scale. Thanks to the flexibility that blockchain technology offers, many different use cases can be adopted to achieve this. One such use case is teaching kids about finances and taking financial responsibility early on.

Banana (BAN) is a freely distributed “potassium-rich” cryptocurrency project launched in 2018, running on the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) architecture. The network is free, instant, and sustainable, making it the ideal environment to learn about crypto and finance.

The project has the main objective of providing an accessible and educational pathway to enter the intricate world of digital assets. They provide intuitive tools, informative workshops, and helpful guides in an easy-to-understand manner so no financial expertise or massive computing power is required.

Banano has many programs that have evolved from its ecosystem, one of which aims to address and improve the problem of financial illiteracy. With the Banana in the Classroom program, teachers can take advantage of blockchain technology to teach students financial and application skills, problem-solving skills, and individual and group responsibility through cryptography and rewards.

One Banano in the Classroom success story is that of Canadian teacher Mr. G, who uses the program as a points system to reward students in his class for being respectful of their surroundings, completing certain tasks, and staying focused. Mr. G distributes Banana throughout the week and “buys it back” in time to redistribute the rewards for the following week.

To save or not to save?

In addition to feeling rewarded, students can spend their hard-earned Banana at Mr. G’s Banana Shop. Teacher accepts BAN tokens for pizza, extra play time outside, games, toys, school supplies, computer time and much more. This reward system introduces children to the concept of earning, saving and spending.

It also teaches conflict resolution, as major group purchases must be made with 100% group approval. The students must discuss the possibilities and eventually come to an agreement. For example, does everyone want a piece of candy today or should they save up and combine their funds to buy pizza next week?

Teaching children about financial responsibility touches many other areas of development as well. Mr. G. claims that before implementing the program in 2019, he was burned out due to misbehavior in his class. Since then, things have reportedly gotten much better, as quoted by the Banano community-curated news website. Daily Peel:

“Banano in the Classroom has been a great success and has significantly improved behavior, general cleanliness of the classroom, and classroom morale. The students get very excited about cashing in their $BAN for weekly prizes. Some groups will even save their Banana week by week to save money for better rewards. That helps tie in a lot of the financial literacy skills I wish I had learned at nine years old.”

Banana aims to remove the high barriers to entry that plague most other crypto projects. The easy-to-use crypto platform offers the infrastructure for people of all ages to learn personal finance, group economics, asset management, and other valuable financial literacy and application skills, making it an impactful use case for cryptocurrency. .