Last week we spent three days in Davis County, Utah with Utah’s business and financial literacy educators. Aside from having a ton of fun speaking with Utah’s brightest, we introduced Banzai Education Edition in case loads of jars. Banzai Education was designed to give teachers the ability to have their students manage their personal finances, and most importantly learn to save and spend wisely.
As part of our presentation at the conference, we felt it appropriate to provide a little imagery. We bought hundreds of Kerr canning jars and filled them with dollar bills - and then gave them all away. This little gimic (if you can call it that) gave us the chance to speak with teachers across the state of all sorts of disciplines about their varying needs for resources to teach financial literacy.
Preparing for the conferences, we concluded that most importantly to us, attending the conferences would be a learning experience. Many of our suppositions about what educators are yearning for in financial literacy have been proven right. A few of those insights are as follows:
Teachers want something new.
Teachers want to adapt their curriculum to a generation on the web.
Students are in need learning experiences that last a lifetime.
Educators are keenly aware of our nations financial literacy gap.
“Our students must become financially literate in order to be responsible members of society. Not only does Banzai teach key financial principles, but also a system which they can use throughout their lives.”
— David F. Babbel, PhD Professor Emeritus of Finance
The Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania
“As an educator, there are far too many software applications that ‘help’ students by taking the thought out of the process. Banzai makes them think which I find refreshing and far more useful as a tool in the classroom.”
— J.B. Haglund
Lower Merion School District,
Pennsylvania
This week we completed our first successful pilot of the Banzai Education Edition in real classrooms. With the help of a highly experienced teacher named Susan Edwards of Wasatch High School in Heber City, Utah, 67 students were taught how to budget and save responsibly using Banzai’s unique “jars” system.
Susan, who has been teaching for over 20 years and is respected across the state in business education, said,
“I love the way Banzai uses jars to teach the principles of personal finance. My students really enjoyed the system. I look forward to using it again next semester.”
Susan used Banzai as supplemental curriculum in two financial literacy classes and one accounting class. The students’ reactions were fantastic! Approximately 80% of the students taught rated the system “Excellent” or “Good” in an anonymous survey. As part of the classes, students were required to track at least four personal expense transactions according to a self-assigned plan which was organized into virtual jars. A number of the students went well beyond the required assignment and made long detailed records of their spending habits.
We have written a case study which covers the pilot at Wasatch High School in greater detail.
We marked an important milestone last week with the launch of Banzai Education, a new version of the application targeted specifically towards students. Financial literacy education is becoming a common component of secondary school curriculums in the United States and elsewhere and Banzai serves as an excellent learning tool.
Aside from making various changes to make the application better suited for students, the Education Edition also includes an administrative tool enabling teachers to track their students’ progress in learning the system and sample lesson plans demonstrating how to use Banzai to teach key concepts in money management. It is in everyone’s best interest to see that the rising generation has strong personal financial management skills and we are pleased to be a part of this effort.
If you’d like to take a look at the Education Edition, you can access it at banzaiway.org. Use demo@banzaiway.org with the password “demo” to login.
One of the more interesting insights we’ve gained since launching Banzai in the fall of last year is that young people take to it like a fish to water. While the system was designed with the needs of adults in mind, a not-insignificant portion of our user base consists of high school and college students. These users quickly grasp the various nuances of Banzai and can easily see the value of following The Banzai Way.
As a means of capitalizing on this trend, we’re preparing to introduce Banzai for Education, a new version built specifically for use in a junior high and high school business, accounting, economics, and financial literacy courses. A separate teacher interface will give educators access to lesson plans, demonstration accounts, and transactions entered by their students as part of the course. Our home state of Utah recently implemented a financial literacy curriculum requirement for all high school students. We expect that this trend will soon be manifest in a number of other states as well. The skills students will obtain from using Banzai will be of benefit to them throughout their lives. Furthermore, we expect that by introducing students to Banzai before they have established ingrained financial habits, we will have a great chance of permanently converting them to The Banzai Way.
Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the date on which we began development of the Banzai website. While The Banzai Way philosophy had been in development for more than five years at that point, efforts to bring it to the web were only launched a year ago.
Thanks for all of your support, particularly over the last three months since our public launch. We’re looking forward to making Banzai’s second year even better than the first.
We’re excited about the New Year here at Banzai and hope you are as well.
We thought we’d get things off to a great start in 2008 by writing about a little-known feature: Changing the order in which jar and account names appear on the site. As you’ve no doubt noticed, the default is to display jars and accounts in the order they were created. While this may work well for some, other users have asked if/how to change that order.
It is a cinch: Just enter the Setup screen and use your mouse to drag and drop the jar and account names into the order you prefer. (This also works with category names, for those users who have chosen to use them.) This new sort order will be reflected everywhere in the site save for the drop-down boxes on the transaction screen which need to be kept in alphabetical order to work properly. You’ll notice the changes in your homepage widgets, on your reports, on the transaction screen jar balance graph, and other places where jars and accounts appear.
It is late Christmas Eve here in the Salt Lake City area and I wanted to take a moment to wish all of you Happy Holidays. I also wish you much success in following The Banzai Way in the New Year!
We’re looking forward to some exciting developments in 2008 which will further extend the functionality of the site. We’ll be excited to share these with you once we’re a little farther along in the development process.
We’re excited to announce an enhancement to Banzai’s transaction entry page. You can now assign a transaction to a particular jar simply by clicking the jar’s name on the list which appears to the right of the transaction form. (Jar names are now underlined to call attention to the feature.) This feature automatically creates a jar entry for whatever amount is necessary to balance the transaction.
One of the coolest benefits of this new feature is that it is now possible to finalize pending transactions which you’ve uploaded from a bank file without using the keyboard! It can all happen in just two mouseclicks. See a demonstration in the video below. We know it is fuzzy, but it should give you a better idea of what is possible using the new feature.
We’d like to thank Banzai Forums user CitizenSwift for suggesting that we add this feature. What features would you like to see implemented in Banzai? Let us know. You can send an email to your coach or, even better, post your idea in the Feature Request thread over on the forums.
Banzai eschews analysis of past data in favor of a focus on the future. The entire system is designed to answer the question “What can I do right now?”
There is a nice side-benefit to this: If you fall behind, there is an easy way to catch up quickly, without having to enter a mountain of transactions. Simply click the Setup link which appears at the top of your homepage. Select each of your accounts and enter the current balances, clicking the Save button each time.
As you do this, Banzai will automatically create transactions which bring your accounts into line. The increase/decrease in the balances will be allocated to the Reserves jar. You may wish to make some manual adjustments to your other jars so that their balances reflect your current needs.
This procedure gives you a “fresh start” with Banzai. Don’t worry about the transactions you missed, focus instead on keeping Banzai up-to-date going forward.
Incidentally, this issue, along with many others, is covered in our extensive FAQs.
We marked an important milestone last week with the launch of Banzai Education, a new version of the application targeted specifically towards students. Financial literacy education is becoming a common component of secondary school curriculums in the United States and elsewhere and Banzai serves as an excellent learning tool.
Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the date on which we began development of the Banzai website. While The Banzai Way philosophy had been in development for more than five years at that point, efforts to bring it to the web were only launched a year ago.
We’re excited to announce an enhancement to Banzai’s transaction entry page. You can now assign a transaction to a particular jar simply by clicking the jar’s name on the list which appears to the right of the transaction form. (Jar names are now underlined to call attention to the feature.) This feature automatically creates a jar entry for whatever amount is necessary to balance the transaction.