Spending: what students can buy with their Banqer dollars

Earning, saving, spending and giving. They’re the core financial lessons we need to be passing onto the next generation. Banqer was built around these concepts, yet we tend to be asked about one more than the others; how do students spend their hard earned Banqer dollars?

In the app

Obviously, we’ve tried to make Banqer as realistic as possible so there are ways your students will spend money in the app:

• Expenses: We suggest you set up bills for your students to experience having to manage their finances. The expenses module has some example expenses or you’re able to add your own to suit your classroom context.
• Investments: Students can purchase properties and earn rental income while paying off their mortgage.
• Assets: In the transport module students are charged a public transport fee, or they can choose to purchase a car, bike or scooter to reduce/eliminate this cost.
• Taxes: It may not be ‘fun’, but it’s a necessary evil (and an important lesson).
• Superannuation/KiwiSaver: Promote saving for retirement from a young age. Then at the end of the year, you might have a retirement day that the students can plan and use their Banqer money to ‘pay’ for.
• Charitable donations: This option is offered to students if you have enabled the ‘Basic Income’ module. Based on in-platform student donations, we make real donations to our charity partners at the end of the year.

In-class store

We recognise that one of the benefits of Banqer is that it can also be used as a behavioural reward system where students can purchase things from you. By no means do these have to be tangible items, so below is a list of ideas that won’t cost you a cent. You could choose to have a set cost for each of these rewards so that when a student has earned a reward, they can transfer the money to you straight away.

• Reduced homework (like completing one less activity)
• Ten minutes silent reading
• Being the class ‘secretary’ and taking the roll in the morning
• Sitting on a seat/couch instead of the carpet during whole class discussions
• Choose a song to play in the background
• 30 minutes sport activity
• ‘Technology’ time
• Free Drawing time
• Dance party
• Student planned fete or canteen days were they use the money in their accounts to ‘buy’ supplies, then they can bank any profits (obviously the school would keep the real profits)
• Class cooking time (depending on school budgets, this option may require you to purchase ingredients)

Students can also purchase items directly from the Class Store on their dashboards. Simply make sure the store is 'open' from your end, then they can click to buy things such as avatar accessories and pets. There's also an option for you to add your own teacher items. Check out The Class Store article for more detailed information.

Class auction

There’s nothing like a Banqer Auction to make things a little competitive for your students! We often run competitions to win auction boxes filled with prizes that you can keep an eye out for. By no means do you need to go out and purchase items to auction off to your students, but some teachers choose to do that. Instead of auctioning off ‘prizes’ you could auction off the ideas listed above. We’ve also heard of some classes where all students ‘donate’ an item that they no longer love to their end of term/year class auction.

We know of one class that starts every week by auctioning off the class couch for a student to sit on instead of the floor (some enterprising students pool their funds together so that they can share the couch for the week). If you’ve managed to get your hands on a Banqer sticker, these can be popular - we’ve heard of one student paying $600 for theirs!

The best ideas come from our teachers, so if you have any more ideas please share them with us or feel free to make a post in our community to share with everyone!