Ask a seven-year-old what money is and you’ll usually hear “it’s what you buy things with”. True, but it skips the interesting part: why money exists at all. Twenty minutes without it answers that better than any explanation.
Five or six small things each — toys, stickers, snacks, a biscuit or two — and at least two players. A sibling, a parent, a grandparent all work. Later on, a pile of buttons or counters.
How it works
- Open two shops. Each player lays their things out on the table. That’s their stock.
- One rule: no money. You can only get something by swapping something of yours for it.
- Make it awkward on purpose. When your child wants your biscuit, only accept something specific they don’t have: “I’ll only swap for a blue sticker.” Let them hit the wall.
- Name the problem. For a swap to work, you both have to want exactly what the other one has, at the same moment. That almost never happens.
- Ask them to fix it. “How could we make this easier?” Children often invent the answer themselves: IOUs, points, tokens.
- Bring out the buttons. Give everyone ten, put a button price on every item, and play again. It suddenly takes seconds.
Buttons aren’t worth anything on their own. They work because everyone agrees to accept them — and that is exactly what money is.
What usually happens
The first round is slow and slightly frustrating, which is the point. The button round feels like magic by comparison, and the penny drops without you having to say much.
Sooner or later someone asks if they can just have more buttons. Brilliant question. Try it: give everyone twenty and see what happens to the price of the biscuit.
Make it easier
Skip the awkward swaps. Just play a normal swapping round, then a button round, and ask which was quicker and why.
Make it harder
Halfway through the button round, hand out extra buttons to everyone. Watch prices creep up — a first taste of why nobody can simply print more money.
Where money came from, the forms it takes now and what banks actually do with it is lesson 1 of the ten-lesson Smartmonies programme. See the ten lessons →