COVERITLIVE.COM

11:46

Baltimore Sun - Hey gang, we'll start our live chat with Nick Maynard of Doorways to Dreams in about 15 minutes. That gives you time to test out Doorways' Celebrity Calamity game. Links to that and other games are on the blog. Or, while you wait, take the poll below.

11:50

Baltimore Sun - Nick Maynard is the Director of Innovation for Doorways to Dreams (D2D) Fund. He directs the financial entertainment initiative. Since joining D2D, Nick has led innovation projects improving marketing to LMI families, piloting prize-based savings in the financial services industry, and offering US Savings Bonds at tax time. Prior to joining D2D, Nick spent almost a decade providing customer, market, and operational strategy consulting to Fortune 1000 executives while at Deloitte Consulting and Braxton Associates. Nick holds both a Masters in Business Administration and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University. He also holds a Bachelors of Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University.

11:50

12:00

Baltimore Sun -

Nick, thanks for joining us today.

12:00

Nick Maynard - I'm happy be here.

12:00

Baltimore Sun -

I have to admit, I did a poor job when I first played Celebrity Calamity, but it was fun. When and how did the idea of teaching finances through gaming come about?

12:01

Nick Maynard - Our co-founder, Peter Tufano of Harvard Business Schoool started looking into video games as a means to teach personal finance about 4 years ago. He does research in the financial education world, and he also noticed the large market for video games. That is where it began...

12:01

Baltimore Sun -

Early results of Celebrity Calamity show that people do pick up lessons from the game and have greater confidence in their ability to manage finances. Why do games work when classroom instruction doesn’t seem to?

12:03

Nick Maynard - Games have a couple of things going for them -- increasing motivation for learning the material which can be a huge hurdle for financial education and allowing players to perform with real world tools (like credit and debit) in a game world.

12:03

[Comment From Tim ]
Why casual games?

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