If there is one bugbear I have with the current UK school curriculum, its that parts of obscure grammar and complex mathematical equations are forced into the brains of our little ones, but most leave school with no concept of how to handle money, how to budget, how to save, how to spend, and how credit and similar works. I belieive that financial literacy plus a few more basic adulting skiils, should be taught to all children, and be compulsory up to age 16.
My husband and I are both accountants, so of course we started teaching about finances when they were very young. Some of our children’s favourite games were playing shops when they were younger, and they were managing a small pocket money budget of their own on a debit card from a very early age.
My children are very much grown up now, and managing their own money at university, but it still made me really happy to discover a suite of “money games” on the Mortgage Calculator site. These sort of games would have been fantastic for my two as they were growing up. So as summer turns to autumn, and we get wet weather creeping in again bringing kids in from the garden, I present a romp through some of my favourites of the games available.
Looking at the selection, I’ll be honest that not every game in this list has a useful learning objective, but most of them would be fun for a few minutes. For example, when I looked at the selection on offer, I was attracted by the Bitcoin section, as I thought it might be fun to teach children something about what Bitcoin is all about (I’m not even sure I understand it exactly!). But instead I found Bitcoin Bubble Shooter, which is the same as any other bubble shooting game if ever you have played one, except that the bubbles have symbols on them which apparently have something to do with Bitcoin. I played for a while and to be honest I’m still none the wiser, and have no idea whether or not we should “End the Fed”. So if you are looking for educational games , maybe don’t get your kids to play that one!
Here are my personal picks from the games that are on offer. I haven’t tried them all but I do like these ones:
Money Counter
This game asks you to use coins and notes to build up to a certain amount. You can set the maximum amount used for the total, and there are also three levels of difficulty from Beginner to Expert – if you are on the Expert level you must make the correct total with the fewest number of coins or notes.
This is interesting for me as it uses US coins and notes, and I am based in the UK. For anyone who doesn’t know the difference,
In the UK we have coins that are 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1, and £2
In the USA the coins are 1c, 5c, 10c and 25c – and the notes begin from 1 dollar.
This would be an interesting game to play if you were planning a trip to America with your child, or if you just wanted to have a discussion with them about how different currencies work in different countries. I had to stop and think about things a bit – I’m not used to counting money in 25s, especially when the coin in question looks alike a 10p piece to me.
Code Panda
This is a fun game which teaches the basic essence of coding, ie. the abilty to split a problem up into small tasks and sequence the tasks that need to be done in order. This might probably be too simple for someone who has already done some coding in school and loves it, but may be suitable for the younger sibling who has heard about coding but hasn’t really started learning it yet.
You are given a series of possible instructions to guide a panda from where he is to where he can find bamboo to eat, and other prizes. As with real coding, you construct the series of instructions in order, and then you give them to the panda and see if you got it right. There are 32 levels of increasing complexity.
Stocks
At the bottom of the Bitcoin section is Stocks, which very loosely simulates the stock market.
What you see is a graph showing a stock whose price goes up and down at a frantic pace moving across the screen over 30 days. All you have to do is buy and sell the stock, aiming of course to buy when the price is low and sell at a profit. the person with the biggest amount of money at the end of 30 days is the winner
This shows at a very basic level how the stock market works. I could imagine my children competing against each other on this when they were younger – this is definitely fun and slightly addictive, with a bit of a learning message if you choose to use it that way.
Cooking Street
There are quite a few variations on the game where you are running a business, having to construct and deliver various goods to customers, and collecting money from them. I’ve tried a few of these – one making pizzas, one making chocolates, one putting together bunches of flowers, and some oftehm i find the mechanism to operate them a bit clunky and difficult to get to grips with (for me, a middle aged lady – I’m sure that children will be able to do them finebut the one I enjoy most is called Cooking Street.
In this one you are cooking steaks, and serving them with salads on the side, drinks and other bits when the game gets harder. You have to give each person what they want before they run out of patience, and make sure you get the order correct or it goes in the bin and the customer walks out in disgust.
This is a game of multitasking and keeping a cool head in a crisis. It doens’t teach financial literacy as such but it does show you a little bit of what hospitality work is like. There are apparently 150 levels to this, so it should keep people interested for a while….
Math Challenge
This is a competitive game – if you have children of similar ages this could be lots of fun.
You can have up to 4 human players and the remainder are computer simulated. All players share one keyboard and each one has a colour and their own keys with which to move their colour. I’ve only played this game in single player mode using the keys WASD for up, left, down, right. I could imagine mayhem with four players gathered round a small keyboard.
The computer puts up a basic arithmetic problem and there is a grid full of numbers. The correct answer appears between 1 and 3 times – what the players have to do is navigate to a spot with the corerect answer and stay there.Ponts are allocated to eveyryone who found the correct answer, and the first player to 5 points wins.
Coffee Shop
This is very much the favourite game that I have found in this series so far. I have even played it with a child, an 11 year old that I am tutoring in English. He had to instruct me what to do and I did it, then we discussed the resuilts afterwards. He really enjoyed it too and we played it quite a few times.
At the beginning of each day, you have to buy stock of coffee, milk, sugar, and cups. You choose the proportions of each ingredient to put in your coffee recipe and how much you want to charge for it. Each day you get a weather forecast and you are told that if it is colder people will want more coffee and will be prepared to pay more for it.
Once you are set up for the day you press play and watch an animation of the day, which shows all the people who pass by. You can see their reactions before they buy (it’s too hot for coffee, or the weather is nice, the price is right, or the price is too expensive) and their reactions after they buy (it was too expensive or the right price, it needs more coffee, milk, sugar, or the recipe was right). Based on what you see and the forecast for the next day you can tweak your price, tweak your recipe and restock based on what you think you might sell. When you start getting it right you build a reputation, and then more people come to the stand just because they have heard it is good.
This is a brilliant game to teach children about business, but I also found it very entertaining for myself and did get hooked for a while.
Conclusion
So all in all this is a gereat resource for a rainy day, with lots of different types of games, fun, educational and a few that are both. Take a look at the games on Mortgage Calculator today!
