FarmVille or School - Who is the Best Money Teacher?

The online game sensation FarmVille is teaching people valuable financial lessons, and they may not even realise.

In the Facebook game (created by software company Zynga) players plant and harvest virtual crops, tend to farmyard animals and expand their land by selling the goods.

The ‘farmers’ help neighbours with chores and exchange gifts with them. As they gain experience points, players move up levels to unlock additional seeds, trees, implements and buildings for purchase.

Behind all the plowing and milking though, are lessons in money management that help strengthen a player’s financial literacy.

The three key elements to our money that FarmVille helps us practice are value, patience and risk. With a range of options to choose from when it comes to planting the crops, players must decide how much to spend in order to receive the greatest return.

The fixed cost of preparing the soil must also be considered, along with timing; if the player is not online to complete the harvest (plants take four hours to four days to mature) the crop withers and dies, thus losing the investment.

This is a sophisticated game. Unlike financial literacy lessons at school which can be purely theoretical, FarmVille allows students to experience the consequences of their money choices in a way they readily relate to: miscalculate and you lose coins.

Launched on 19 June 2009, FarmVille has rocketed to the top of Facebook’s application charts with over 26 million users tending their farm daily. More than 73 million people ‘go rural’ each month.

FarmVille is also encouraging people to talk about money. Blogs, wikis and tip sheets have sprouted across the web, discussing which crops are the most valuable, whether gold coins or experience points are better and whether buying a tractor does actually save the farmer money and time.

It would be difficult for a classroom teacher to generate such an extensive discussion with their constraints of time and resources.

The online learning never sleeps, with reports of teenagers setting their alarm-clock for the middle of the night to complete a profitable virtual harvest. That behaviour contrasts greatly with these recent Tweets:

“In financial Decision mAKING…bORING aS HELL”
[@MrHarris86 from USA]

“class boring financial mgmnt oh well”
[@AliMacRacing from Canada]

“i dislike having to deal with financial matters because i find it profoundly boring and have no natural aptitude for it.”
[@misterJVB from Philippines]

With parents concerned their children don’t value a dollar, too-readily embrace consumer debt and aren’t learning about money at school, FarmVille might be sneaking under the fence and sharing the money-mindsets students need: everything has a value, investing takes time and be comfortable with the risk.

Tags: education, money mastery, teens and money