Fun educational games to help improve children's financial literacy

Assalamualaikum

"Money does not grow on trees!"

Raise your hands up if your parents have ever said that to you growing up 🙋🏻‍♀️

I am definitely one of them 😂

It's usually said when us kids were asking for a lot of stuff or things that were too expensive for the family's budget. Especially when our family lived in rural area and worked only laborious jobs that paid barely enough to cover our financial needs.

What can we say? The technology and education level back when we were children were not as advanced as today. There were not much opportunity to learn about financial stuff easily, hence we had rather low sense of money. What we knew was we want something and we wish to have it quick lol

Compared to now, newer kids are luckier as both the technology and education have grown immensely. They are even often combined together to make educational games that are easily accessible through smartphone and computers that most children have individually today. So not only could they gain advanced knowledge easily, the learning experience is also more fun for them than being in a rigid classroom environment.

Never in my younger years have I ever imagined I can learn about money while lounging in my own room. I thought I would have nodded off listening to a rambling teacher in front of a black/white board 😂

One of such beneficial game sites that I've found is the Mortgage Calculator, a site dedicated to help users looking forward to own a home to calculate their possible monthly mortgage payments.

The name of the page might sound mature for children. But they do have a special section providing fun and free games for children to learn more about money management through various simulation and interactive games. The site is free from pop up advertisements too so it is safe for elementary kids to use with less worry about them clicking links to dubious pages.

For children learning about addition, subtraction, and value of money, game such as Grocery Cashier would be suitable for their level. 

It's a game where you act like a cashier checking out items for the customers

The process is rather easy.

- Add the total of the items being checked out

- Subtract the paid value to get the change amount

- Click the right amount of money notes or coins to return the change

There are two payment methods available in the game which the customers would alternately use which are cash and gift vouchers that each has different change system.

Payment via cash. Change = depends on cash amount given.

Payment via vouchers. Change = zero.

The difficulty of this game is very low and even kindergarten kids could play it.

It's helpful to teach them about the different value of money that we have from the big note to the smallest coin and how to add each of them to form certain amount. My only gripe is the timer a.k.a the yellow bar at the bottom of the screen was speedy though. I panicked sometimes and lost the sales I made because I didn't return the change in time 😂

Another game that is suitable for children learning about the money value is Cash Back. The concept is similar to Grocery Cashier, but with advanced difficulties stretching to Medium and Hard modes.

Easy Mode: Very straightforward. Change value in in single digit.

Medium Mode: Change value could come in double digit and would have decimal points.

Hard Mode: The change value can come in THREE digits and decimal points lol

The first two modes are quite natural to see in our daily lives with the reasonable pricing value. But the Hard Mode really cracked me up in a bittersweet way.

$480 for a cupcake? That's wayyyy too expensive lol. But seeing how our inflation rate is hiking up more and more these days, it's actually a likely situation where in the future, one single item would cost as much as a car. Sad huhu

This game is fun generally but there were two issues I found to be quite bothersome for the gameplay. If we ever so slightly clicked or tapped on the screen where there's no buttons, the settings board would pop up. It'd happen several times and the timer for the customer would run out and we'd suddenly move on to the next customer.

And if we already clicked the change counter before, the number would not reset for the next customer. We'd likely end up giving wrong change to the customer and an error would occur that even if we fix it to the right amount, the system would pop up in bright red: INCORRECT 💆🏻‍♀️

I ended up having to skip that customer altogether because it's not worth the stress 😂

So, yes. Despite the site being dedicated for children's educational games, it is still fun even for adults like me to play because who said children's games would be easy? The panic could sometimes be more intense than expected 😂

Besides helping the children learn about basic mathematics (addition, subtraction, etc) and the value of money, the Mortgage Calculator's site is also useful to teach some sense for children who likes to ask for things that are out of budget thinking "money grows on tree".

The business simulation category where we have to act as business owners catering to people's orders and providing best services for them is especially helpful for that purpose. For example:

Chocolate Shop - The customers would flood in with average patience bar, but the server (us) would sometimes slow down in movement because she needs coffee. So the customers would have to wait longer and their anger is just off the roof lol. I lost money because of that!

She slowed down so hard because she's not caffeine-charged yet 😂

Working in retail and service industries is HARD. Not to mention the increased challenge when we meet the impatient and stuck up people with "customer is always right" mentality. These games provide that experience at a mellowed down level and whoever is playing are likely to learn how much harder it is to work and get money in real world.

Oh how I wish that money would really just grow on trees 🤣

Thank you for reading.
Bye and Assalamualaikum.