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Financial literacy means understanding how skills such as financial management, budgeting and investment can be used for effective financial decision-making. The earlier these skills are adopted into life, the more opportunities for wealth accumulation. Unfortunately, the education system is woefully short of the financial literacy and application skills we need to be successful, and we're still learning how that impacts the economy more broadly.
Switching service providers and choosing the best mortgage rates – these are the types of decisions that most people will make. But not fully understanding how it all works can cost a significant amount of money, according to recent research. The National Council of Financial Educators (nfec) found that, on average, US adults felt they lost $1,634 in 2020 due to a lack of financial management skills. By extrapolating these numbers, the lack of knowledge cost the citizens of the United States about $415 billion in 2020.
Given that in 2018, the respondents estimated that the average loss for this calendar year was $1,230, This suggests that more and more people are in danger of missing out on the opportunity to build a financially stable future. With the web 3 and cryptography becoming increasingly popular with the next generations, it becomes even more important to teach children the right financial and financial application skills.
Learning financial literacy with crypto
Many hope that the rise of digital currencies may eventually help to solve the growing problem of money mismanagement on both an individual and an institutional scale. As a result of the flexibility offered by blockchain technology, many different use cases can be adopted for this purpose. One of these uses is to teach children how to finance and assume financial responsibility at an early age.
Banano (BAN) is a freely-distributed, “potassium-rich” cryptocurrency project launched in 2018, running on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) architecture. The network is small, instantaneous and durable, making it the perfect environment to learn more about cryptography and finance.
The main objective of the project is to provide an accessible and educative pathway into the complex world of digital assets. They provide intuitive tools, informative workshops and useful guidebooks in a way that is easy to understand so that financial experience and massive computing power are not needed.
Banano has a number of programs that have evolved from its ecosystem, one of which is aimed at addressing and improving the issue of financial illiteracy. With the banano curriculum in the class, teachers can take advantage of blockchain technology to teach students financial knowledge and application skills, problem-solving skills, and individual and collective responsibility by means of cryptography and rewards.
One success story of Banano in the Classroom is about the Canadian teacher Mr. G who uses the program as a point system to reward class members who respect their environment, perform certain tasks and remain focused. Mr. G distributes Banano throughout the week, and the "redeem" within the cycle time rewards again for the next week.
Is this about saving or not?
In addition to feeling rewarded, students may spend their hard earned bananas in Mr. g's banana shop. Teacher accepts prohibited chips for pizza, extra time for outdoor play, games, toys, school supplies, computer time, and much more. It introduces children to the concept of winning, saving and spending.
He also teaches conflict resolution, as purchases for large groups must be made with the approval of all groups. Students need to discuss opportunities and ultimately come to an agreement. For instance, does everyone want a sweet today, or should they put money aside for pizza next week?
Financial accountability education is also relevant to many other areas of development. Mr. g says that before the program was implemented in 2019, he was exhausted because of poor classroom behaviour. Since then, things have reportedly improved a lot, as cited by the Banano community-curated news website Daily Peel:
“Banano in the Classroom has been a huge hit and has significantly improved behavior, overall class cleanliness, and class morale. Students are very enthusiastic about cashing out their $ban on weekly awards. Certain groups will even save their bananas from one week to the next to win better prizes. This helps link many of the financial literacy skills I would have liked to have acquired by the age of nine."
Banano's goal is to remove barriers to entry from most other crypto projects. The easy-to-use crypto platform provides people of all ages with the infrastructure they need to learn more about personal finances, group economics, asset management, and other useful financial literacy and enforcement competencies, This makes it a case of impacting usage for cryptography.
