Money Talks and So Should We
by Drashti Pandya | A spotlight on a 2018 Global Sprint project
Andrea Ferrero, (@PocketsChange), is a co-founder of Pockets Change. Andrea was selected to join the current round of Mozilla Open Leaders with their project Money Talks and So Should We. She works with students, families and teachers across the country to change the way finance is taught. She had over decade of experience in education, business and tech.
I interviewed Andrea to learn more about Money Talks and So Should We and how you can help at the Mozilla’s Global Sprint 2018.
What is Money Talks and So Should We?
At Pockets Change we’re changing the way money is taught. We combine Hip Hop, Finance, and Design Thinking to build financial capability in K-12 and early adulthood.
Our workshops and curriculum are a start but useful and accessible finance personal assessments are severely lacking in education. Those that exist do little to support the development of self-efficacy and personal understanding, rather they focus on facts and formulas such as calculating compound interest. Money Talks is about building those tools — open digital self-assessments that empower us all in evaluating our relationship with money.
Why did you start Money Talks and So Should We?
We started this project to make talking about money more approachable. To embrace goal setting, progress monitoring, and self-reflection in a new way that felt as engaging as a Buzzfeed quiz to find your Hogwarts house. The Global Sprint is a kick-off for the first tool prototypes and a review of our assessment design practices.
Assessment is about reflecting on personal understanding and charting growth. To create impactful and inclusive tools that accomplish that with the topic of finance we knew we wanted to work open. Being part of Mozilla’s Open Leadership program has been an incredible learning experience.
What challenges have you faced working on this project?
Time and scope…a deep desire to do all the things and not enough time to actually do all the things.
One of the greatest things my mentor has helped me with throughout the Open Leaders program is narrowing focus on key tasks and creating plans for handling pain points before they become absolute roadblocks.
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
There are ways for everyone to get involved. Over the summer we will be developing our self-assessment tools further and refining our evaluation design process to support learners across ages in examining their relationship with money. We need feedback and insights to make the tools and the process for their creation better.
We need quiz lovers, learners, educators, designers, evaluation researchers, and programmers to help with the following
- feedback on the tool prototypes (what works, what doesn’t, what could be better)
- feedback on our evaluation design process (our standards and assessment design practices)
- suggestions for tool design (how can we improve tools aesthetically and functionally)
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2018?
You can find our project on Github:
On the project’s github page, you can find specific ways to contribute in the README.md, as well as the tasks for #mozsprint on the “issues” tab.
Connect with us on Twitter and, if you are participating in the Santa Barbara, California area, join us in-person for the Global Sprint at UCSB. Register to join us in-person here: https://ti.to/Mozilla/global-sprint-santa-barbara18
What meme or gif best represents your project?
Join us wherever you are May 10–11 at Mozilla’s Global Sprint to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Register today
This post by Drashti Pandya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
