 Wilson Preparatory Academy is a public charter school in Wilson, North Carolina. Like many schools, they are adding personal finance to their curriculum to better prepare students for life after high school. In their course, they cover many of life's big financial decisions such as mortgages and car loans. To add an engaging dynamic to their lessons, Wilson Prep integrated our free Bitcoin for Everybody course into their curriculum. So the big problem that we have at Wilson Preparatory Academy is this whole concept of educate, motivate and graduate. So the educate part really becomes dynamic and we have a school finance course. So we try to figure out how do we get the kids engaged in school finance and we have to look at our first principle, which is deeper learning. Our goal is always to provide a deep learning experience for kids and not just create courses from yesteryear. We really have to look towards the future. So we looked at the problem that we currently have in our society and we have students who will graduate college with $1.3 trillion in debt. And there's also this thing called the case-shaped economy and currently we also talk about friction versus frictionless living experiences. So those are the three things that we really want to focus on when we talk about our school finance component. How can we help kids look at their debt that they'll assume if they go to college and then get a scholarship and then look at kids from the lens of where are they on this case-shaped economy and then look at kids from the lens of what are some of these items that create friction for them and how do we provide a frictionless learning experience for kids? Bitcoin really is the new age of money. It's really everywhere that we are now. It's in PayPal, Venmo, Cash App. You can pay restaurants in Bitcoin. You can buy tons and tons of items with Bitcoin nowadays. So it's really important for our scholars to be on the forefront of learning about what Bitcoin is about so that they can be prepared in the future to be able to use this. So when I went into the Bitcoin for everybody class, I noticed that there's a lot of flexibility and the content is set up so you can flex it to the needs of your kids. You can take the information and integrate it into your LMS, your learner management system, whether it's Google Class, whether it's Schoology, whether it's Canva, whatever your district or your school is using. Now you have the flexibility to integrate it into your LMS. And we found that we use Wakelet and we use Flipgrid and the kids are familiar with Wakelet and Flipgrid as a way to curate their experiences and get their stories out. So now we just use the course as a storytelling experience. So the kids used the information that's inside of the course. We were able to unpack it for them chunk by chunk, unit by unit, give them prompts inside of Wakelet. They were able to go in, answer questions, use their Flipgrid. They were able to find resources, add those in resources from the web so they had total research experience. So the entire course really became an action research experience per kid because each kid found different information that was germane for them that they learned from rather than just saying this is the entire course and this is what you have to do. So it still has parameters and at the end the kids have to take an assessment and pass the assessment with a 70% and then receive a certificate of completion. So the idea was we gave the kids formative assessments like the grade K-12 school does formative assessments for every unit of experience that they had inside of their course and the formative assessments were inside of Wakelet using Flipgrid. So Miss Ellis asked us for assignment number one to describe what went wrong with money in the past. There are some kids chosen to become money over others and what makes it good money and why Bitcoin is well placed to supersede prior forms. So in the past money was never really consistent, barter was used. So for example trading things like wheat for apples. However there's a problem called the double coincidence of wants. So for example what if you have apples right and you want wheat? You only have apples to trade but what if the person who has wheat doesn't want apples right? Then you're left without apples. So money became gold. They used gold as a form of money. However gold was not very easy to manage or find and it was never as accurate as people needed it. The reason we chose the dollar as our national monetary value was because it won the competition between other monetary value. It's called SORA value and they compete against each other in things like scarcity, portability, profitability and history. Lastly Bitcoin is Bitcoin. Nobody can stop it because it is not a physical form of money. The government can't command anyone to stop making it because it is literally coded coins on a computer. However it is very efficient because there are only 21 million coins. So the money is limited therefore giving it value and when trying to buy or sell something. So the student reaction to the course was kind of mixed at first right? Because they've never experienced it so it's something new. This is not something that they grew up with so it's a totally different concept for them. So it was kind of mixed. Some kids I have the Cash App but I didn't know that the Bitcoin component was on there. I used the Cash App just for purchasing items or transacting with my friends. I didn't realize that I can use the Cash App as a SORA value with Bitcoin. So it was a learning experience for kids. They really had to stretch outside of their comfort zones and really come into grips with the concept of investing. The concepts of time and space because that's what Bitcoin is. It's beyond just your traditional I go to the bank and drop off money and the money sits in the bank and whenever I need it I would draw it. So they had to learn the entire concept with a six unit course but by the end of the course you can see the light bulb just going on like wow I get it. And we were a little apprehensive being the first high school in America to actually use the Bitcoin for everybody class in this fashion. So we didn't know if kids would actually get the certificate and our goal was if we had one or two kids obtain the certificate. It would be a great win. We have multiple kids and the kids who didn't pass maybe got 50 or 60 on the test. A week later they took the test again and passed it and they want to keep going. They want to pass the course to show off their certificates for their friends and their family. And they're also going to use this certificate as part of their college application process. Some of them want to go into business. Some of them did not realize what FinTech was financial technology. And now they are intrigued by it and they're going to use this as part of their college application. And if the kids who decide that they don't want to go to college at the moment. And they want to go into the workforce work experience. Now they have a background knowledge about this. So you might even have a kid show up to a job and say, hey, I really want to work here. Do you guys pay in Bitcoin? So ways that teachers can use a blended learning model to implement Sailor Academy or any other method. Definitely make sure that you have timelines set for the students. So Sailor Academy, the Bitcoin course was self-paced if you kept it like that. But I made sure to have deadlines so that the scholars stayed on track. It was really important to hold them to those deadlines so that they didn't fall behind. It also kept them working in class every day. We talked about the material together and just try to keep the conversation flowing and everybody learning together. Because I learned a lot with this course as well. I think that it's really important to point out that Sailor Academy was free. There are a lot of platforms that our school alone pays a lot of money for to give our scholars a good education with our blended learning model. And it's really cool that Sailor Academy was free to our scholars and offered a really, really good course with much higher level thinking than they're used to. So I think that that's definitely worth saying. The message to all heads of schools, all superintendents, all leaders of any charter school, private school or public school, do not get left behind.