For parents & educators
Pocket money teaches discipline. It does not explain why prices rise or where a bank loan comes from — and children ask those questions long before they earn anything. This is what to teach, roughly when, and how to say it.
Ages are guidance, not gates. A curious nine-year-old who asks where money comes from is ready for the answer.
A coin is not valuable because of the metal. It works because everyone accepts it and the state stands behind it. Ask what would happen if a shop stopped accepting it — that question does most of the teaching.
Ask where a bank gets the money for a loan. When they answer “from savers”, show them that no saver's balance falls. The number in the borrower's account is new, and it was typed.
Interest rates are decided by a committee, and that decision reaches their family's rent or mortgage. Teenagers who have noticed prices rising find this more compelling than budgeting advice.
Central bank balance sheets, quantitative easing, the offshore dollar system. At this point they can post the entries themselves and check a claim against a Federal Reserve source.
Teach the mechanism, not just the habit. Saving pocket money teaches discipline, but it does not explain why prices rise or where a bank loan comes from — and children ask those questions long before they have an income. Start concrete: money is a promise someone owes you, and a bank writes a new one every time it lends. OpenMacro turns that into a free, game-style lesson a child can play without an account.
Around 7 or 8 for the idea that money is a claim on someone rather than a thing with inherent value. Around 10 to 12 for where bank money comes from. Teenagers can handle the full mechanism — reserves, central banks, inflation — and usually find it more interesting than budgeting, because it explains something they have noticed and nobody has explained.
Avoid "prices go up". Say instead: the same money buys less than it used to, because there is more money chasing the same amount of stuff. Then make it concrete with something they buy — if their pocket money bought four sweets last year and three now, their money lost a quarter of its power even though the number in their hand never changed.
Ask them where a bank gets the money for a loan. Most people, including most adults, answer "from other people's savings" — and that is wrong. The bank types a new number into the borrower's account and writes down that they are owed it back. Both numbers appear at the same moment, and nobody else's balance went down. That is the single most useful thing a child can learn about money.
Yes, and it is free for that with no licence to buy. The lessons are MIT-licensed and open source, so a teacher can use them, translate them, reorder them, or write their own and submit it. Lessons are plain JSON files, which means an economics teacher with no coding experience can write one in a text editor and have it reviewed by the maintainers.
The website has no analytics, no advertising and no third-party tracking scripts, and you can read every page and play the demo without an account. The app requires no sign-in: progress and reward points stay on the device and are never uploaded. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. The only personal data collected anywhere is an email address, and only if an adult chooses to join the launch waitlist.
You do not need to. Each lesson explains the mechanism as it goes, and every glossary entry links the primary source — the Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of England — so you can check any claim without taking our word for it. Most parents who work through the first track report understanding bank money creation for the first time themselves.