A SteamHead member and teacher managed a grade 5 makerspace class, and her students learned some financial literacy through using nano cryptocurrency.
For those who aren’t familiar, nano allows for fast and low-cost transactions, and is very cheap to purchase so the real-world fiat value is not as impactful on students as physical money might be. I thought it was a great tool to teach her students about financial concepts like budgeting, saving, and investing. Interesting to me – she did not hold lectures on these topics specifically, but rather blended them into her regular plans (if any of Carrie’s plans could ever be referred to as “regular”!).
To get started, she gave each student a regular and equal amount of nano to use as “payment” for classroom supplies. As her class was in a makerspace and focused on building projects, these supplies were important for students to obtain. Want more glitter for your cardboard racecar? Gotta check the pricelist.
Initially, the students could only use their nano to purchase supplies from the class shelf, and actually kept the balances on a paper list instead of doing real transactions. But after a week, she introduced a classroom bank which paid interest on deposits. To manage her time, she also started offering jobs to a few students who were responsible for running the bank, which paid a salary in nano. The concept of wallets was introduced, and the few kids who knew them were responsible for updating balances. For some 11 years olds, it was a piece of cake. For others, they wanted nothing to do with it.
After a month, she added another layer to the environment by charging “rent” for desks. This gave the students another expense to manage and helped them understand the concept of fixed costs. She also started allowing the students to transact with each other, rather than just with her as the teacher.
By the end of the semester, the students had gained a solid understanding of financial concepts and were using them in the pursuit of their projects. It was so rewarding to see how engaged and excited they were about learning about personal finance.
Guess where they did most of their work? The floor! No rent for floorspace! I wasn’t there but I imagine there was literal shouts of joy when they figured that one out, it must have been chaos! I wonder if anyone was already locked into desk contracts?
Overall, using nano as a teaching tool was a great success. It allowed the students to understand financial concepts in a practical and hands-on way, and I’m so SO confident that the skills they learned will serve them well in the future.
