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Credit games: teach about credit cards, credit scores & reports

Credit games make teaching about credit fun. The Good Credit Game is a credit curriculum kit that's built around a half-dozen credit games. The Good Credit Game is used to teach credit classes for adults and young adults.

Why teach credit classes with credit games?

Both students and teachers know that financial education classes are difficult for a variety of reasons. Teaching about credit can be particularly difficult. Among the challenges are:

  • Dealing with personal finances in a credit class or in credit counseling can feel threatening or judgmental.

  • Financial classes are often seen as dry or boring.

  • The material is often taught with lectures, PowerPoint or worksheets which don't engage students.

  • It can be hard to master financial topics like credit because they can be so complex.

  • Financial classes may have a wide range of participants, from those with lots of financial experience and lots of education to those with very little.

We use credit games to overcome a lot of these challenges. Perhaps most importantly, the credit games that are part of our credit curriculum kit make the material fun. Built around small-group participation, the credit games are collaborative and hands-on. As a result, the credit games engage students; it's hard for them to tune out of a class or be uninvolved. Also, the format allows people to interact, share stories and learn from each other; it's a far different class than one where people just sit quietly and work on their own. In addition, the credit games largely run themselves so a teacher doesn't have to bear as much of the teaching load of a credit class.

What credit games are part of The Good Credit Game?

Our credit curriculum uses six credit games (and includes a bunch more as supplemental in-class activities). The credit board game, The Road to Good Credit, is the back side of the double-sided game board. It's a combination of Trivial Pursuit and Chutes and Ladders. The other activities are perhaps more hands-on activities than actual credit games, although they include some game-like qualities.

In fact, the very first activity in The Good Credit Game kit has participants jump in and sort personal attributes (income, paying bills on time, savings, etc.) into categories of whether they'd make someone more or less likely to give a loan. This credit game, "Would You Make the Loan" is done twice: once as a friend making a loan and once as a financial lender making a loan. The other activities then include a card sorting credit game to determine what information comes from a credit score, credit report credit application or loan application. Then this is followed by another group sorting exercise to determine how different parts of a credit report affect a credit score.


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