Project Overview
Goal: Create a free, open-source investing education resource for young people (12+) that achieves similar learning outcomes to commercial resources like "Blue Chip Kids" by curating existing Khan Academy content and supplementing with custom materials.
Approach: Rather than creating all content from scratch, we leverage Khan Academy's extensive free video library and map it to proven pedagogical sequences from established financial literacy books.
Methodology
Step 1: Identify a Proven Pedagogical Sequence
Rather than inventing our own curriculum order, we mapped to Blue Chip Kids by David W. Bianchi (Wiley, 2015) - a well-regarded introduction to investing for young people. The book covers 100 topics across 16 chapters in a sequence optimized for beginners:
- Money, Money, Money (what is money, currencies, bitcoin)
- Different Ways to Pay for Things (checking, credit cards, debit)
- The Stock Market is Cool (stocks, market cap, indexes, IPOs)
- Let's Buy and Sell Some Stocks (long/short, bulls/bears, leverage)
- Stock Options (puts, calls) ⚠️ Advanced
- Funds (index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, hedge funds)
- Bonds and CDs (bonds, yield, treasuries)
- Analyzing Companies (P/E, EBITDA, dividends, earnings)
- Borrowing Money (mortgages, credit ratings, bankruptcy)
- Interest Rates (simple, compound, APR)
- Net Worth (assets, liabilities, financial statements)
- Taxes (income, deductions, brackets)
- The Economy (Fed, GDP, inflation, national debt)
- Venture Capital and Private Equity ⚠️ Advanced
- Money Smart (retirement, IRAs, 401k)
- And So It Ends (motivation/conclusion)
This sequence is intuitive: start with "what is money" before ownership, cover mechanics before analysis, end with action (retirement accounts).
Method: Used Claude to retrieve Blue Chip Kid’s Table of Contents from the web
Step 2: Source Available Content
We extracted structured outlines from 4 Khan Academy courses:
- Financial Literacy (16 units, 98 skills) - Most comprehensive, exercise-heavy
- Personal Finance (10 units) - Video-focused, practical advice
- Finance and Capital Markets (10 units) - More technical, covers stocks/bonds deeply
- Economics & Personal Finance VA (21 units) - State curriculum aligned, less detailed
Method: Used Claude browser extension on each Khan Academy course page to extract all units, lessons, and video URLs into markdown files. This created a searchable database of ~200+ videos/exercises.
Step 3: Map Videos to Book Chapters
For each Blue Chip Kids chapter, we used Claude to identify:
- Best matching video(s) from Khan Academy
- Gaps where no good video exists
- Supplementary exercises where available
This produced a 46-video syllabus covering all 16 chapters, with a core playlist of 20 essential videos (~3 hours).
This sequence can be used generally to create custom video learning paths from different sources