Piggy Pennies: An Interactive Piggy Bank to Help Children Learn Money Management

Abstract

Wealth management skill has turned out to be one of the most crucial skills for every young people. A good habit of wealth management would bene­t people on a larger scale in wealth growth and life quality. In this case, it would be most bene­cial to educate people as early as when they are still children. Children usually do not understand where money comes from and how to spend it by nature. However, multiple challenges arise when parents realize the importance of the education of money management skills and teach their children. These challenges include but are not limited to, shortage of time, being short of suitable teaching tools, and being afraid of misleading. A few solutions and their ­nal products have already hit the market. By conducting thorough research on those products, it is evident that almost none of them puts its concentration on the collaboration among parents and their children, whereas parents could act as a crucial role in guiding their children, in most cases. To facilitate the collaboration of parents and children, this thesis provides a revolutionary solution called Piggy Pennies. Piggy Pennies provides a platform that integrates abilities to teach kids the concept of money itself and cultivating good, controlled spending habits. This solution consists of two parts. First, there is an interactive Piggy Bank, which is a real-entity terminal for kids to handle real cash, for example, depositing, withdrawing, making purchasing plans, and taking care of chores. In addition, a mobile application is another terminal for parents to set up chores, send allowance, and monitor the pro­le of their children, which is a perfect all-in-one tool to help their children on demand. The solution described in this thesis, not only addresses the problems parents may encounter during the wealth management education process but provides chances and tools to engage children and their parents together in this education process. The solution of Piggy Pennies is a significant breakthrough by filling the gap where the market fails to provide a solution concentrating on parent-children collaboration and adapting both real entity and a virtual mobile application. The design of this solution maximized the achievement of educating children into wealth management