GoodCentsYour school. Your economy.
Students learn money by having some.
GoodCents turns a classroom into a working economy. Students show up and get paid. They pay rent on their seat, get taxed on their earnings, spend at a store their teacher stocks, earn interest on their savings, borrow from the bank or from each other, and invest in real assets at live market prices. Every lesson arrives as something that happened to them.
A paycheck for showing up
Attendance becomes salary on payday, with a progressive tax and seat rent taken off the top. The paystub shows every line.
A store worth saving for
Teachers stock it — snacks, privileges, homework passes, whatever motivates the room. Students redeem with a QR code.
Credit that has to be earned
Loans from the bank or from classmates, repaid out of paychecks. Miss one and the credit score remembers.
Investing, not gambling
A curated set of names students have actually heard of, at live prices — and each school picks which ones. Simulated trades, real volatility, and no way to bet on an outcome.
A fixed money supply
Every currency unit in a GoodCents school comes out of a treasury with a hard cap. Awards and salaries mint from it; taxes, rent, fines and purchases return to it. That constraint is the point — a teacher who gives away too much can watch the treasury drain, and so can the class. An economy with a budget teaches something an unlimited one can't.
Built for the person running it
GoodCents was written by a teacher for his own classroom, which is why the tedious parts got the attention: paying thirty students takes one tap, attendance imports from a spreadsheet, staff permissions are granular enough to hand a student the banker's job, and every action lands in a ledger that can be corrected but never quietly rewritten.
Currently in a pilot at a continuation high school in California, with a wider release to follow. If you run a classroom and want to try it, get in touch.