About Capital Valley
Why this game exists
A whole generation says the same thing: "I know I should be saving and investing for my future. I just don't know where to start." The problem isn't a lack of information. The material is out there, the videos are everywhere, and the advice never stops. The problem is how we learn. You don't become an investor by listening to people talk about investing, any more than you learn to swim by reading a book about swimming.
That is where Capital Valley begins. It is a simulation in which you learn by deciding: you manage virtual capital across five levels, read the economic news, make choices, watch what they lead to, get things wrong at no risk, and try again. Return, risk, diversification, and liquidity are never taught first. They are experienced, and only then given a name. That is the opposite of the usual lecture, and it is the order the research on financial education recommends.
What the research says
The leading studies in the field (notably those by Kaiser, Lusardi, and Menkhoff, published in the major economics journals) all point the same way: financial education has real, measurable effects, and active formats such as simulations and hands-on experience work better than passive ones. Capital Valley puts those findings straight to work: no quizzes, no lessons, just decisions and what follows from them.
Built without shortcuts
Three choices shape the game.
Determinism. There is no luck in Capital Valley: the same decisions always produce the same results. Two students in the same class can compare their strategies rigorously, and a teacher can run a debrief in which every difference in outcomes traces back to a difference in decisions. Few games hold themselves to that standard, and it is what makes this one a serious teaching tool.
Reading what you're told. Before it teaches you how to spread your capital around, the game teaches you to weigh what you read: telling a rumor from an official announcement, recognizing that an expert opinion is an analysis rather than a certainty, discovering that a consensus is not the truth. At a time when young people get their market news from influencers, we believe this is the most urgent skill of all to pass on.
No speculation. No derivatives, no leverage, no promise of getting rich quick. The game teaches long-term investing, diversification, and patience. The classroom version collects no personal data about students: no account, no email address, just a game code.
Who is behind the project
Capital Valley is built by the founder of France's leading provider of online degree and certificate programs, who guided more than 100,000 learners through their studies before selling the company in 2022 to a higher education group. A pioneer of digital learning in France, he watched e-learning become, far too often, what it should never have been: passive videos and documents to click through. Capital Valley is his answer: putting decisions, commitment, and consequences back at the heart of learning online.
The game is designed hand in hand with practicing economics teachers, who try the sequences out in real classrooms and shape the teaching content. Capital Valley also takes part in Global Money Week, the international financial education campaign coordinated by the OECD.
A transparent business model
The license is free for secondary schools, with no limits, no stripped-down version, and no data collection. The project is funded elsewhere: licenses for higher education, partnerships with organizations committed to financial education, and sponsorships that let us give licenses to institutions that could never pay for them. That split is deliberate: teaching students about money should not cost public education a thing.
Contact us
Teachers and institutions: [email protected]
Press and partnerships: [email protected]