Yo! It’s 2017 (almost ‘18). Put away those old coloring books (I actually love coloring books) and get out those crayons, stickers, dinosaur stamps and....QR scanners and private keys?
Making a paper wallet as an investment for your child’s future can be fun, and a fantastic learning and bonding experience for the both of you.
Getting Interested Together
As a parent, I know how difficult it can be to play with my son at times. His imagination is so vibrant, his storylines and visions so prolific and expansive, and his energy so endless, that I usually can’t keep up.
As adults we often feel overwhelmed, especially when confronted with the mental-bandwidth-eating, soul destroying worries and cares of the “real world.” Bills. Relationship problems with friends and loved ones. Worrying about the health and welfare of our children.
**I have found that whenever possible, I should find activities my son and I can both get truly into. One might think cryptocurrency and investment are not topics a five year old can understand, or be into on a fundamental level, but one would be sorely mistaken, in my opinion!
Why paper wallets for teaching kids about crypto?
Well, basically for two reasons: security and fun.
1. SECURITY
Paper wallets are one of the most (if not the most) secure ways to store cryptocurrency there is. For more information in regard to the security aspect, please check out the most recent post I did over at @steemcityniigata.
2. FUN
The second reason that paper wallets are best is because you can decorate them!!!!
Decorating your paper wallet!
First, you have to make a paper wallet, and print it out using your printer’s gray scale setting (so you and your child can color them). For those interested in learning how to make paper wallets, there are a number of excellent resources that can be found by doing a quick web search. I prefer to use sites such as bitaddress.org, as the source code for this site’s wallet generator is readily available, downloadable, open source, and transparent.
One place you may wish to get started is HERE.
Alright, let’s get to it!
Get all your supplies out: stickers, old magazines, stamps, scissors, crayons, glue, etc. Now: GO NUTS!!! I found this activity worked best when both my son and I made our own respective paper wallets, so we could both exercise full creative autonomy and have fun comparing and contrasting our unique designs.
Make sure that your child knows not to color the QR codes, or to obscure the text of the keys. Other than that, anything goes! Have fun! When you’re all done, you can laminate the wallets (it’s a good practice to make two copies of each wallet) to make them shiny, fun to hold, and durable. I use a small home laminator I purchased for about 30 dollars at the local office supply store.
What has my son learned from this experience?
I’ve been amazed.
He knows all about both the public key and the private key, and even uses the correct language when talking about them. We’ve been messing around with paper wallets for about half a year now, so he is somewhat familiar with the basics of crypto. I asked him tonight if he knew which was the private key, and he correctly answered non-chalantly, “spend.”
My wife and I often talk about the different crypto prices going up or down in both English and Japanese, and he understands that the wallets we have made together can fluctuate in value. Just tonight we checked one of his older wallets made before the big spike in Bitcoin price and we were both pleasantly surprised. He exclaimed “I’m rich!”
As a father, the most important thing I can do for my son is let him know I love him. Part of that is preparing for his future.
Beyond learning math, wise saving habits, and a new technology called “cryptocurrency” we are both learning that time spent together is the most valuable time there is, and an investment beyond price.
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(Thanks for stopping by. If you missed the last installment of Unschooling Blog, Vol. 36: “ FLEA MARKET TIME! Learning about money is easy. You don’t need to “do a unit” on it, or go to school,” you can find that HERE.
NOTE: The paper wallet featured in this post is just an example of the type of wallets we made today. You should NEVER take photos of a wallet’s private keys, unless you want to lose all of your money!
~KafkA
Graham Smith is a Voluntaryist activist, creator, and peaceful parent residing in Niigata City, Japan. Graham runs the "Voluntary Japan" online initiative with a presence here on Steem, as well as Facebook and Twitter. (Hit me up so I can stop talking about myself in the third person!)