Bankinter launches basic economics education project via a video game

Bankinter has launched a pilot project in three Madrid schools aimed at teaching primary school children basic economic and financial concepts by means of a video game.

This project, called "Animal Crossing and the Economy", enables children as young as seven to start learning about values and prices through the video game "Animal Crossing: New Leaf" for Nintendo 3DS. The project has been carried out in the Las Tablas Valverde and Nuestra Señora de la Asunción schools in Madrid, and will soon also be implemented in Los Olmos school, also in Madrid.

In "Animal Crossing", children learn financial concepts naturally, in the form of a game. In this game, the child is the protagonist, and is responsible for everything that happens during the game. The child is the mayor of the town, and as such decides whether to buy a house (with the corresponding mortgage loan payments), and whether to pay for municipal projects for the good of the people or to invest all his "Bells" (the currency used in Animal Crossing) in things that will enable him to earn even more. It is the child's town, and the child decides how absolutely EVERYTHING works, from the clothes (s)he wears to where and how (s)he builds a house, the businesses (s)he opens or the fruit sold.

To learn how to play, children receive some very basic guidance for using the console. The objective is for them to be able intuitively to carry out all the possibilities of the game.

Starting from scratch, the pupils, as town mayors, have to build and extend their houses by applying for loans and paying off mortgages. To clear these debts they have to work picking and selling fruit, at the same time learning the value of saving, the law of supply and demand, the scarcity principle, import/export and entrepreneurship.

In short it serves to make children aware that power always carries responsibility, and to understand through the game that all decisions, including financial ones, have consequences.

"Animal Crossing" seeks to respond to the 2013-2017 Financial Education Plan promoted by Banco de España (Spain's Central Bank) and the CNMV (Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores, Spain's Securities and Exchange Commission), which aims to "improve the population's financial education in order to enable citizens to face the new financial situation with sufficient confidence". One of the fundamental challenges of the Plan is precisely its implementation in schools, coordinating efforts to incorporate financial education into the teaching system.

According to Raquel Azcárraga, Sustainability Manager at Bankinter and a participant in this project, "the sooner economic values such as the importance of saving, the value of money and trade, etc. are inculcated, the better prepared future generations will be to confront possible economic crises, and the more we will be able to contribute to the construction of fairer and more developed societies".

This initiative forms part of Bankinter's "Tres en Raya" Sustainability Plan, the game known as "noughts and crosses" in the UK and "tic-tac-toe" in the US), which seeks to align the three business dimensions: economic, social and environmental. The economic, with strategies that focus on promoting innovation and support for entrepreneurship, as the entity's response to the crisis; the social, being committed to the construction of a bank for all which is fully accessible to anyone; and the environmental, with the implementation of measures aimed at reducing the carbon footprint caused by their activities, whether directly, indirectly or induced.