Dotsy App: Encourage your kids to learn about money in a fun and rewarding way

Dotsy is a fun app being developed by one of our close friends Ezra Keddell that uses chores and an investing game to teach your kids how to manage their money through real life experience. Basically Dotsy transforms every day chores into a money game for kids.



There are other apps out there that allow parents to set kids chores, but none that extend the teaching to managing personal investment and finance.  This is where Dotsy is unique with its ability to let kids make virtual term investment and stock trades linked to real world metrics and data, while to them it seems just like a fun game.

Here's how it works:

Set your kids up with their own profile and how much they will earn per chore.



Add a task for them to complete, how many dots they will get for doing the task and the day(s) and times it occurs on.

Get an overview of who is doing what tasks and on what day here.

See what tasks each child has to complete and how many dots they have earned.

See at a glance how many dots kids have earned on the Dashboard.

Dotsy is an app that works on your mobile phone or tablet (android, iphone, and windows), and allows your kids to earn ‘dots’ by completing everyday household chores that you set through the parent panel. Once they’ve started earning and build up a balance, that’s where the fun begins.

There’s two things that they can do with the dots they’ve earned.

1. Earn time - this is the equivalent of a term investment for us adults. It teaches them to delay gratification, and that by being patient and putting away some savings they can increase the value of their dots.
2. Dot X game - within the app is a game based on 8 characters that mirror some of the world's major stock markets. There’s Nikki, Footsy, Kiwi, Ozzy, Seng, Dow, Naz and Indy. Kids can then use their dots to invest with the characters, and start to learn about real markets and how they work.

This gives them the opportunity and responsibility to start figuring out what sort of financial strategy works for them. And hopefully learn a few hard lessons along the way that will set them in good stead for when they start having to manage their day to day finances on their own.

  

To get the app created and funded, Ezra is using Kickstarter. The way Kickstarter works is you raise the funding you need by getting pledges which convert into a reward (in this case a lifetime licence to use the product) once the app is complete.

If this sounds like something you'd like to see developed, click here to make a $5 pledge which will give you lifetime access to Dotsy once it's been developed. You have nothing to lose as if the total amount required for the project isn't achieved, you won't be charged a cent.

To pledge your support for Dotsy visit the Kickstarter page here.

A great way to get behind Kiwi ingenuity and entrepreneurship don't you think?!