Mooney Edu

Mission: 

Improve people's quality of life by teaching financial education in a practical, simple, fun and humanized way, to improve the quality of life of families.

Vision:

Making dreams come true for millions of people.

- Reach public and private schools

- Being in the pockets of children and young people

- Impact families and teachers

Values: 

1) Education first

2) Always think about people

3) The pursuit of excellence is a daily exercise

4) Be honest, acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them

5) Be free to think outside the box

6) Making money does not mean doing evil

7) Own what you are doing in a meritocratic environment.

CPO - Chief Product Owner, the main role is:

- Leadership of the product team, including the routines of the team that develops the methodology and follow-up of the technology development

- Definition of roadmap and product backlog

- Understanding of the education market and customer success to be able to develop the product and bring the best solutions that satisfy customers' pains

- Definition and follow-up of OKRs

- Commercial presentations for large school chains

Demonstrating that Mooney Edu has a positive impact on learners is a priority that we can’t assume only ourselves, that’s why we are looking for partnerships, given that the space for scaling changes significantly when there is evidence of the learning process. 

Today the product team is organized in such a way that, depending on the work to be done during the challenge, a person with the expertise will assume part of the work. 

Examples: we have a senior product analyst who can take on part of the CPO demands when necessary for the program or can participate himself in the LEAP Project to contribute with the development of the project. There is also a part-time psychopedagogue who can be placed full-time on the team to develop the assessment process. Finally, there is a developer whose main focus is to structure assessment data through technology, but we still have a limited capacity to assess students without the help of a program like the LEAP Project. 

We are also looking for other institutions in Brazil that can help in the investigative part of impact measurement, because it will be very necessary to large school networks and public sector projects, where we can scale in a more significant way and have an increasingly greater impact on young people to become conscious citizens.

Gamified financial education teaching platform, to improve the future of next generations of adults, developing long term healthy financial habits.

Financial education is not taught at home or in schools, and the topic of money is still a cultural taboo in Brazil, which has serious consequences in the adult lives of the population. 

Without financial education, for example, 40% of young people between 18 and 24 years old have or have had bad credit. Despite been mandatory in the school curriculum since 2019 by the National Common Curricular Base, financial education is still present in less than 20% of the 180 thousand Brazilian basic education schools and not in an effective or practical way, with many the topic being confused with Mathematics financial and explained in a totally expository and outdated way.

We have developed an innovative and technological gamified methodology K-12 to teach financial literacy within schools, which includes lesson plans to teachers + app to students (with knowledge trails), also involving the family in this process, which brings gamification.

Teacher’s platform: Each teacher has its individual login and password to access lessons plans according to the specific grades they teach. All the lessons plans for the year are available with all the information about how to conduct the class, so the teacher can feel comfortable with the content. The classes are dynamic, with active methodologies, that leads the students to learn in a simple, practical way. 

There are board and card games that are integrated in the platform so the teachers can conduct the class with the students. In addition, teachers can check if the students are developing as individual learning path in the app, that supports the methodology. 

They can access the main statistics of performance for each student and an average for the whole class. The last feature teachers have is the “Missions”, where they can register arrangements with the students, such as attend classes, deliver a project, bring a specific material to class or make homework, for example. Every time a student complete the task, teachers register the progress and students earn gems in the app.

Student’s app: Is a tool to support the methodology and complement classes through the language of young digital natives. It’s a gamified virtual environment that consists of collecting and interacting with Mooners, virtual pets. The student can exchange Mooner with friends, compete, and evolve them using gems, the game's money.

To earn gems and virtual pets, the student needs to explore the features which are:

Journey: an adaptive learning path, in which each phase corresponds to a class he will take during the school year. There will be a section of knowledge, and activities that they need to complete to advance to the next phase. These challenges are adaptive according to the performance that student’s have. 

Piggy banks: piggy banks are a way for students to register how much money they are able to save in order to achieve a goal. 

Missions: assigning tasks or responsibilities, within a gamified environment, which can be done either by the teacher or family. The goal is to develop habits and fulfil responsibilities and tasks.

Teacher's platform demo 

Student’s app demo

We don’t have any structured study that demonstrates the effectiveness of our solution. That’s why we think MIT LEAP project is a great opportunity.

The main study in the literature is about an experimental study of the impact of a comprehensive financial education program in Brazil made by The World Bank Development Research Group & Latin America and Caribbean Region on December 2013. The program was implemented in “6 states, 868 schools, and approximately 20,000 high school students in Brazil through a randomized control trial. The program increased student financial knowledge by a quarter of a standard deviation and led to a 1.4 percentage point increase in saving for purchases, better likelihood of financial planning, and greater participation in household financial decisions by students. “Trickleup” impacts on parents were also significant, with improvements in parent financial knowledge, savings, and spending behavior. The study also finds evidence that the program affected students’ inter-temporal preferences and attitudes.” Link to the study: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/753501468015879809/pdf/WPS6723.pdf

Specifically about Mooney Edu, we implemented a POC in a major school in Brazil during 2 months. In the regular school curriculum, they already had a financial education program, but they were not fully satisfied with the program. So they implemented Mooney Edu in some grades (only part of the secondary grades had access to Mooney product  - 3 classes of 6th and 9th graders). In general we had positive results with this POC, that are presented in the next question. The teacher said that compared to the classes they had before, Mooney Edu classes were more practical and the content were more robust. The students were engaged during the two months and evaluated the classes positively, sayings that the classes helped to increase their knowledge. In addition they were using the app in a complementary and constant way in their houses, so the POC went beyond the school environment.

Specifically about the POC results: - Students had a 25.4% increase in their average score on self-assessment of financial concepts

- 98% of students were active in the app

- 83% of students finished all the tasks available on the app

- 90% of students were satisfied with the classes and app

- 85% of students feel that Mooney App helped them to be more aware of their money, and they could save with one action of the project in only one day almost US$70,00 to their graduation party

The operation today reaches more than 100 schools in Brazil (3rd year of operation) and 5 schools in Colombia (first year of operation, still in the prospecting process), mostly small and medium-sized schools. 

To grow in the educational market, it is necessary to show evidence that the product has a significant result in the young people who use it, called evidence-based learning. 

Today, we have external research such as that from the World Bank with their own program, and testimonials from customers who use Mooney Edu, but these are not enough to be able to sell to important schools for us to scale. In this scenario, to sell to big schools or school chains, not having an impact assessment method ends up harming the growth of the company because they are very demanding with the results of solutions they buy. 

Not only in large schools and school chains, but we started working to sell to public schools in Brazil and with the distribution partner in Colombia. It is evident that without presenting learning results often means that there is not even space to present the solution. Our participation in LEAP Project can help turn the product more scalable, and with sales to larger or public schools, we are able to significantly increase the operation to be able to make the product available to other schools that do not have availability to pay, also impacting communities that are most needy and need to learn financial education.

- Students who have access to Mooney Edu, compared to students who don't, do they have a faster learning of financial competences?

- Students who have access to Mooney Edu, compared to students who don't, do they develop healthier financial habits?

- What impact has the development of these healthier financial habits had on Mooney Edu’s students?

1) Student assessment: Create and implement a student assessment method in relation to the development of financial knowledge and practical application, with a diagnostic assessment at the beginning of the process and an assessment at the end of two/two and a half months. Separate a group of students who have access to Mooney Edu's financial education classes and a control group that does not take financial education classes, in order to determine whether there is a significant difference in the students' grades in relation to the knowledge they present. 

Mooney already have an assessment model that was applied in the past with a large school, but we did not get results because, according to the school, the first test was not in a good standard for evaluation. In this way, we can retrieve the tests applied to be able to make better use of the time and begin this stage more quickly. In the beginning of the program we can review the parameters of the assessment and apply it with students, so that, at the end of the project, we can apply the final assessment and collect the results.

2) Usage statistics: With the technology usage, we provide to teachers basic statistics on student performance on the individual adaptive learning path. During the 12-week program, we can better understand the value of this data and what other data is important for the teacher to evaluate the development of financial education with students, in order to implement a complementary report card. In this report card, we can use the data collected by the usage of technology by students and, at the end, we can also use the results of the assessments mentioned in item 1 to compose a student progress report card.

3) Impact assessment: In addition to the project, it is very important to understand the impact of using the Mooney Edu product on young people. It would be important to understand which methods we can use to evaluate long-term results. With the help of the LEAP Project, we can, during the 12 weeks, structure an impact evaluation method so that, in the future, we can have a basis on how these young people who had access to the Mooney Edu product are financially compared to a control group of young people who did not have access.

Having a customer base of 100 schools, we can take classes from these schools to apply the assessments and data analysis proposed in 1 and 2, to compare with schools that don’t use Mooney Edu or that have another financial education program.

There are schools that have been using Mooney Edu product since 2021, which means that there can also be a comparison among schools with students who have used Mooney Edu since 2021, students who only used it this year and the control group of students who did not use.

Finally, proposal 3 can be made by following up students from schools that use Mooney Edu for 3 years to compare some financial habits in relation to students from schools that do not use Mooney Edu. For example, are spending and saving patterns different? Or is credit card use more conscious? How do these students help with family finances?

For the organization, have greater market penetration in schools chains and B2G with evidence in the process of learning and changing financial behaviors. For the solution, achieve a more mature product, in order to bring more concrete data to schools, students and families on the development of financial skills through evidence in a complementary report card. This also helps small and middle schools to achieve a competitive advantage, being able to prove to families the impact of the learning they offer to their students.