For the second consecutive time, a team of high school students supported by the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE has won the regional decision of the school competition YES! on 6 July 2021 and thus reached the final round. Supervised by Eveline Wuttke, Professor of Business Education at the Department of Economics at Frankfurt's Goethe University, the group of nine students from Raiffeisen-Campus Dernbach, a private high school in Rhineland-Palatinate, developed a game designed to teach young adults financial literacy – and prevailed among a total of 23 school teams in the preliminary round.
The Raiffeisen students’ concept provides a solution to the question of how to get young people interested in financial topics. A hybrid game that combines board game elements with the functionality and possibilities of an app is intended to make young people playfully fit in dealing with finances and in this way also prevent them from getting into debt – with the aim of becoming “Richappy”, as the Dernbach game project is called. After voting by the students of all eight groups participating in the South-West regional final, the Raiffeisen Campus team was able to draw the ticket for the final in September 2021.
SAFE accompanies school teams to the finals for the second consecutive time
At the final round, the winning teams from the regional preliminary rounds will also meet international student groups from Hong Kong and Geneva for the first time. The project that is chosen as the winner by the students themselves will receive an award from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy at the end of the national finals in Berlin.
The school competition YES! (“Young Economic Summit”) has been held nationwide in five regions since 2019. The competition, initiated by the ZBW – Leibniz Information Center for Economics and the Joachim Herz Foundation, encourages high school students to develop innovative solutions to economic, ecological and social problems, guided by researchers from Leibniz institutions throughout Germany.
SAFE had already participated in the competition in 2020 with the supervision of two school teams; the students of the European School RheinMain, as well as the Raiffeisen Campus from Dernbach, had reached the national finals. In the current round, SAFE, the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO), the Walter Eucken Institute and the ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research are advising the teams from the South-West region on the development of their ideas.
More information on YES! – Young Economic Summit can be found here
