Six students from Withington Girls’ School in Manchester last week carried off the £3,000 prize in this year’s Apprentice Challenge from Financial Mail, sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland’s MoneySense educational programme.
The team, calling themselves Money Minded, triumphed in a nationwide contest to devise and market a game to make teaching personal finance fun.
Withington’s game beat three other impressive shortlisted entries in front of an audience of 350 students and teachers at the climax of Financial Mail’s Breaking the Mould conference on Monday, in Park Lane, central London.
The Money Minded team, aged 16 to 17, faced a grilling from the stars of BBC TV’s The Apprentice – Margaret Mountford (Lord Alan Sugar’s right-hand woman), Saira Khan and Tim Campbell – in the ‘boardroom’ before going on to win the £3,000 for their school.
The runner-up teams, from The Cherwell School, in Oxford (team iFloos pictured left), Plymouth College (team Game Girls) and King’s High, Warwick (team Phoenix), each collected cheques for £1,000.
Money Minded team members Jayana Patel, Elise Varley, Alex Davis, Nicole Jesse, Gabby Westington and Shruti Chaudhary designed and produced a board game for up to six players that they estimated would cost £7 to make, but would sell for £14.
Up to six players can travel around the brain-shaped board using brain-shaped counters. They must answer multiple choice questions, true or false questions, solve anagrams or provide longer answers under time pressure, while attempting to reach the end of the board to become the winner.
The personal finance questions for the game were printed on the back of cards designed to look like credit and debit cards, with different colours representing levels of difficulty.
The team impressed the judges with their enthusiasm for learning about financial products such as current accounts, interest rates, mortgages and pensions.
Personal finance lessons will become compulsory in schools from next year. According to the Personal Finance Education Group half of teenagers have been in debt by the age of 17.
A spokeswoman for MoneySense, which works with 60 per cent of secondary schools, said RBS was thrilled to support a competition that encouraged and empowered young people to think for themselves about how they would like to deliver financial education in an innovative way.
Delegates at the Breaking the Mould conference – the third such careers conference for schools that Financial Mail has organised – heard from top-flight speakers. The day-long showcase was designed to capture students’ imaginations and encourage them to think in adventurous ways about their approach to the world of work.
Phillippa Williamson, chief executive of the Serious Fraud Office, led a panel looking at the business of ’sleuthing’ alongside detective of air accidents at the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
IBM led a panel looking at jobs in the technology sector with Wendy Tan White, the founder of web-hosting company moonfruit.com who was also involved in setting up egg.com, Maya Moufarek, a marketing manager for Google and Holly Tucker, founder of e-retailer notonthehighstreet.com.
Danuta Gray, chief executive of Telefonica O2 Ireland (pictured), spoke encouragingly about careers for young women in telecoms. A team from NatWest spoke of the ‘hidden jobs’ within large organisations such as sponsorship and events management, which are not often associated with careers in the banking sector.
The Food and Drink Federation sponsored talks about careers involving the senses, such as creating perfume and wine tasting, as well as optometry, audiology and physiotherapy.
ALL Breaking the Mould pictures are being added to the FMWF Facebook group – FMWF: Women in Business (click here).
The video entries of the MoneySense Apprentice Challenge finalists, one-to-one interviews with some of our inspirational speakers, and clips from the day will be uploaded to our YouTube page.
Click here for the brochure: Breaking the Mould 2010 brochure.
This post has been commented 3 times
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March 9th, 2010 at 9:47 amDaniel Britton says:
Looks like a great event. Young people have so much talent and creativity when allowed and encouraged to express it
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March 9th, 2010 at 9:06 pmBoard Game Pimping Roundup by Purple Pawn says:
[...] design group “Money Minded”, walked away with £3,000 for the first place design. (source) The game board is brain shaped and it has brain-shaped [...]
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March 18th, 2010 at 10:46 amMoneySense Apprentice Challenge finalists share their experience « FMWF says:
[...] had made it to the final of the RBS M0neySense Apprentice Challenge and had been sent to this swanky hotel to face the fearsome Margaret Mountford. In front of 350 [...]