Children's Moneyworld was formed by a group of likeminded educationalists, financial advisors, teachers and technical developers in 1999. The idea was simple... to help younger pupils learn about numeracy by using money.
This was achieved by creating an entire family of characters called
"The Moneykins". These are an entire range of child-friendly cartoon characters that help children form associations between coins, characters and their numeric equivalents. The "Moneykins" feature throughout the website, and on all our content; and act as a constant re-inforcement throughout everything that the site provides.
Children's Moneyworld was launched way back in 1999 and received favourable reviews from parenting and teaching magazines as being the only site to educate children about numeracy, using money! In those days, all our content was in black and white and was designed to be printed only. This was long before interactive whiteboards existed! We began with 50 printable activities!
Our content became very popular, very quickly. Children's Moneyworld was beginning to be used by many international users, so we extended our range to 200, and included more complex activities such as shopping problems.
By 2002, we had been added to the BBC and Channel 4 learning pages and were being used by 72 countries. Our content was still PDF based and we soon realised that the future was in allowing users to interact with our content. We further extended our range of material to 350, and began work on interactive content using Macromedia Flash.
In early 2003 we decided to make the website dynamic, this would mean that we could add much more content; and our developers could concentrate on new activities rather than the website. We now averaged over 1,500 unique visitors per month and had built up a list of over 16,000 users! Our range was extended to 450 Flash based activities.
In Autumn 2004 we had re-worked our existing range of 450 activities away from PDF into Flash technology. We also increased our range to 550 activities and created a new Edutainment site focusing on games based learning. Our website was still holding the top search results in Google and our visitors increased to over 2,500 per month. We received press coverage in educational magazines and were reviewed by PFEG and TEEM for our work.
Our content was adapted to work on interactive whiteboards and was now requiring much less internet speed/bandwidth to deliver. We worked with Worcestershire LA as a supplier to their Content Stream service.
In early 2009 we decided to overhaul our website, content and delivery systems to bring Children's Moneyworld fully into the learning arena. After enquiries from international schools and businesses, we decided to re-engineer every single activity (numbering 500) into a fully interactive, two-way scoring activity with lesson notes, instructions and rich new media! Schools in the UK were beginning to benefit from luxurious new learning environments, but with very little (or effective) content to go with them. So, we began the long task of re-creating a whole new Children's Moneyworld for the new decade.
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