Kickstarter and teaching economics to kids

02/01/13 20:12:00    

By Michael Mealling

Found via Instapundit and Helen's Page: Milton Friedman for kids? Absolutely! An economic adventure book series for kids (ages 6-12) is a Kickstarter project for a series of books to teach kids economics from an Austrian perspective.

This project brought a couple of thoughts to mind. The first is that I think children can learn and should be taught topics like economics and engineering at a young age. Sure, make it age appropirate and accessible, but there's no reason kids can't be exposed to the concepts. The same thing goes for basic engineering concepts. Estonia is teaching programming to kids starting at age 7 and going through age 16 to turn them into technology literate producers instead of low-wage tech consumers. I work in an industry that desperately needs skilled workers with the ability to think systematically about not just code but the world in general. Programs like this Kickstarter project and Estonia's are desperately needed across our educational system.

The second thought is about crowdfunding projects in general. One of the entrepreneurs in Hypepotamus is in the crowdfunding space so we've been discussing what works and what doesn't. The economic adventure book project has done many things right. It has the “That should exist!” feel with its constituency. Enough work has been done before the funding project even started to show progress and the abilities of the project members. And its been 'vetted' by being linked from Instapunding and Helen's Page. Crowdfunding is a marketing process with many moving parts and many chances to run off the rails quickly. The two things people who donate to a projects are looking for are the same things any investor is looking for: is the opportunity real and can the team do it.

So yea, I donated a few bucks.