2020 Green
This comprehensive, educational Web site helps teenagers master a variety of skills through real-life financial situations inside a virtual building of businesses, retail shops, and institutions.
Created in conjunction with the Aetna Foundation, this educational resource promotes financial literacy, planning, and responsibility. Read a paycheck to understand withholding. Pay your taxes. Find out how credit cards work. Track your investments and save for the future. At 2020 Green, visitors create their own learning path at their own pace, making the site appropriate for use at home and in the classroom. A Teacher section offers lesson plans, classroom activities, and online individual and class evaluation tools. Designed around the metaphor of a building, 2020 Green is rooted in a real-world financial setting and at the same time meets the needs of diverse instructional environments. The site’s modular structure and flexibility allows students to explore concepts in any combination, and lets teachers adapt personal finance to their own lesson plans and teaching style. Users interact with animated graphics and tools that illustrate difficult financial concepts, while a backend database responds immediately to their choices and lets them save their work. Students learn by interacting with the content: they can see immediately the ramifications of their financial choices, call up additional information via text and glossary palettes, and even measure their own performance with a self-challenge quiz.