How Silver State Schools Credit Union makes hour-long workshops interactive with Cashy

Students stop listening long before the class period ends

In Las Vegas, Silver State Schools Credit Union’s financial education team teaches in classrooms, from K-12 to adult education, and ran more than 400 workshops last school year. JimDre Westbrook, Vice President of Community Impact & Advocacy, leads the program, and Brianna Chaves, Education Liaison Representative, teaches alongside him.

Holding students’ attention for a whole session is the hard part.

“We can go into the classroom and perhaps sometimes have up to 90 minutes of instruction, but we all know they’re not paying attention to anything over possibly 30 minutes.” JimDre Westbrook, Vice President of Community Impact & Advocacy

Games break up long workshops

The team builds Cashy’s games and presentations into its workshops to break the session up.

For budgeting, Brianna runs Money Talk, Cashy’s trivia game with a discussion round after every question.

“We understand that everybody doesn’t learn the same way. There’s different paces, there are different speeds, so we kind of come at it different ways. So we love what we do with Cashy.” JimDre Westbrook, Vice President of Community Impact & Advocacy

High school students playing Cashy

A high school invited the team back to run the credit game

Brianna had already taught credit at one high school. She went back with Cashy’s credit presentation, then the game.

“When the credit game came out, the school wanted us to come back and run the game for them as a refresher.” Brianna Chaves, Education Liaison Representative

For another class, a teacher asked for the questions in the Life Game, Cashy’s financial life simulation, ahead of time and handed out a worksheet so students could answer them as the class played. Asked which games the team uses most, JimDre named two.

“Credit Survivors and the Life Game have been the favorites.” JimDre Westbrook, Vice President of Community Impact & Advocacy

Credit Survivors, Cashy’s credit game

Branch managers are next to run workshops with Cashy

SSSCU’s branch managers have their own requirements for financial literacy workshops in the community. Brianna began inviting them to use Cashy with their own accounts.

“We’re looking forward to letting the branch managers also use Cashy whenever they want to.” JimDre Westbrook, Vice President of Community Impact & Advocacy

Branch managers sign in with their SSSCU email, get a short tutorial on their first login, and can run a session the same day, so training them takes almost no time.