The one idea
Money is a set of decisions you can learn to make, not weather that happens to you. Every rand has a job, and you can find out where yours are going.
This is the unit we built first, and the one we would show a principal before any other.
Money is the most concrete of the five Academy pillars, the easiest to make undeniably useful, and the one a parent most obviously wants their child to have. It is also the one where a curriculum can do real damage if it is careless — with a bad claim, a stale figure, or an exercise that quietly publishes which children are poor.
The mechanic: The Real Price
Every FutureFit unit is carried by one scored, adversarial game, and this one is a hunt for the gap between the number in the advert and what actually leaves your hand.
Learners bring in adverts, pamphlets, shop-window prices and pay-later leaflets, and take them apart with two named tools they use for the rest of the term:
- The Twelve Move — anything per month, times 12. Per week, times 52. Per day, 365.
- The Handover Total — how much money will have left my hand by the time I own this outright? Every payment, every fee, every trip to fetch it.
A catch only counts with the numbers worked, on paper. “That feels expensive” scores nothing. That rule is set before anything is worth points, and it is the same demand for evidence that our AI literacy unit makes of a hallucination.
The ten-pointer is the whole unit. Every other row on the scoring table points outward at a seller. The ten-pointer is the only one where the thing you caught was yourself — noticing you were about to buy something, stopping, and being able to name the actual reason. Boredom. A sale ending. Because a friend had one.
Scepticism becomes status. That is the mechanism, and it is the same one that makes the AI unit work.
What is in the nine weeks
The spine runs from where money comes from, through what things really cost, to what to charge for your own work, where money sits when you are not spending it, what debt actually costs, and finally tax — which most learners discover they have been paying since they were about five.
Module 6 is the one people remember. The class works a rollover loan on the board, one month at a time, with a second column headed “Repaid so far” that the teacher writes R0 into on every single row. You keep going until somebody in the room notices the second column. That noticing is the lesson, and it lands harder than any warning an adult could give.
The ledger
Every learner keeps a paper ledger, and it is marked as heavily as the plan itself.
One rule: every number is traced to where it came from. Counted, worked, or GUESS — written in capitals, next to the figure. A guess marked as a guess costs nothing. A guess passed off as a fact is the only thing in the unit that fails.
That is the line that separates this from every other “teach kids about money” course, and it is the same idea as the honesty log in our AI unit. Adults sign things they cannot trace every day, and pay for it.
Why there are no real numbers in it
Not one current tax threshold, VAT rate, minimum wage or interest rate is stated as fact anywhere in the unit.
Every figure is either openly labelled as invented for the arithmetic — module 7 uses an easy 10% precisely so nobody mistakes it for the real rate — or left as a marked placeholder in a register that gets worked before the unit is ever taught.
A stale figure in a school document is the one error a principal will notice, and it makes every other number in the unit suspect. So the board carries today’s numbers, looked up that morning, with the date written next to them. The unit applies its own ledger rule to itself, in front of the learners, which teaches more than the lesson does.
Built for the school you actually have
Shared phones. Capped data. Load-shedding. Thirty learners with an enormous spread of household income sitting in the same room.
Every module has a screen-free half that works on paper, and several never need a screen at all. A calculator is welcome and never required. Module 2 lets a learner run their week in rands, in megabytes, or in minutes — so a learner with no money moving still has a complete ledger and nobody has to say why.
See the Academy · AI literacy, Senior Phase · Book a school day
The scoring: The Real Price
Learners hunt the gap between the advertised number and what actually leaves your hand. Evidence required — "that feels expensive" scores zero. Class leaderboard, best catches read out.
| Catch | Points |
|---|---|
| A hidden fee, found and worked | 1 |
| The year behind a monthly price | 1 |
| A total that exists but is never printed | 3 |
| An advert where the true cost is more than double the number shown | 5 |
| Catching yourself about to make a money decision, stopping, and naming the actual reason | 10 |
The 9 weeks
One module per week. Each runs the same four parts: a short video, a task with a checkable answer, the scored round, and one slice of the thing they are building.
- 0 Setup and rules The room's rules, the ledger, and what is legally open to you
- 1 Where money comes from Three doors — time, a thing you made, something you own. Most adults open only the first.
- 2 Every rand has a job A rand with no job already has one, and it is "spend"
- 3 The real price The advertised number is not the price
- 4 Pricing what you make A price has a floor and a ceiling, and beginners stand on the floor
- 5 Where money sleeps Every place money sleeps takes something. There is nowhere that takes nothing.
- 6 Debt and the trap Compounding works the same whichever way it points
- 7 Tax and being legit You have been paying tax since you were five. Being on the books is a door.
- 8 Making it real A traced number is the difference between a plan and a wish
What they hand in
A priced offer, a one-page money plan, and a paper ledger that traces every number in both — with guesses marked as guesses.
Questions about Finance — Senior Phase
Does this teach children to get rich?
No, and we would not sell it if it did. It teaches arithmetic that most adults cannot do, pointed at the exact deals those adults are being offered — the multiply-by-twelve on a monthly price, the full repayment total on a store card, the fee that eats the interest. A learner finishes harder to sell to, which is a claim we can actually stand behind.
Is there anything in it that could embarrass a learner from a poor household?
This was the single biggest thing we designed around. No learner ever states their family's income, rent, grant status or debt — out loud or in writing. Every exercise uses supplied worked examples or the learner's own pocket money. Nothing scored is ever personal, because scored work is public. The one exercise that would have published each learner's weekly spending was found in review and replaced.
Why are there no actual tax rates or VAT figures in it?
Because they change every February and a stale number in a school document teaches a lie. The unit teaches the mechanism with openly invented figures that are easy to divide, and the real numbers go on the board on the day, with the date they were looked up written next to them. Every figure we owe the world is tracked in a register we work before the unit is taught.
Do learners actually sell things?
Not until the legal position is settled. The artefact is a priced offer — a plan that could be sold — and it is complete without a rand changing hands. South African law on what a person under 15 may do for money changed in 2014 in a way that is genuinely unsettled, and we are not going to have a school find that out on our behalf.
Can a maths teacher run it, or does it need a specialist?
A maths teacher can run it. Every module has a checkable right answer, a teacher note covering the predictable wrong turn, and a screen-free half that works on paper through load-shedding.