How do you make Economics fun and fascinating for High School kids?
We recently worked with the Council for Economic Education to do just that. Our task was to create a set of videos to help make some complex economics ideas engaging and relatable to High School aged kids … and we learned a thing or two ourselves!
The Council’s mission is to advocate for better school-based economic and personal finance education for teenagers and the people who teach them. Our mission: produce engaging economic success stories that would resonate with 9-12th graders, and help to clarify some complicated economic concepts through smart lessons disguised as storytelling.
We worked with educators to pinpoint which messages were most difficult to understand for this age group: Business Plan, Entrepreneur, Debt and Equity Financing, Credit Score, and Supply Chain.
Our team created five relatable scenarios that illustrated, through storytelling, these economics concepts. There’s the young entrepreneur who starts a garage-cleaning business, the teen who creates a supply chain to mass-produce rhinestone-encrusted cellphone covers, and the young inventor who must shore up his credit score in order to secure a loan to back his “surround sound video game chair.”
To achieve the strong, pop art look that would appeal to our age group, we shot actors in front of a green screen and animated with After Effects and Cinema 4d: generating small towns, a juice factory, a happy neighborhood filled with clean garages, a groovy surround-sound chair, some blinged-out cellphone covers and many happy customers. Most importantly, through the continued consultation with the Economics Council’s educators, the learning points were driven home with crisp, clear and entertaining storytelling.
We were thrilled to help the council bring financial literacy to young future entrepreneurs. See all the videos at http://entrepecon.