Apps for Teaching Economic Literacy to Tens of Thousands of Students and Teachers in Comprehensive Schools

Junior Achievement (JA) Finland

JA Finland is a nationwide, non-profit organisation. It provides schools and educational institutions with experiential and hands-on learning content. For teachers, JA offers continuing professional development as well as tools for teaching work-life skills, entrepreneurship and economic literacy.

Duunikoutsi-app to support job application

Duunikoutsi is a free app aimed at young people aged 13–25. The app’s content is designed for those who are looking for a TET placement, summer job, internship or employment.

The Duunikoutsi app includes everything a young person needs to know about the world of work: tips for job hunting, steps for the job application process, tools for preparing for interviews, motivational tests, workplace guidelines and inspiring career videos.

Additionally, Duunikoutsi’s skills profile provides a ready-made CV template for the user.

Yrityskylään-app

Yrityskylä Primary school is a learning programme designed for 6th-grade students, focusing on economics, the world of work, entrepreneurship and society.

It is based on the national curriculum and the programme consists of teacher training, Yrityskylä lessons and an immersive school day in the mini-society of Yrityskylä.

Post-revision statistics for the Yrityskylä app:

Game-based learning system

Yrityskylä Secondary school is a gamified learning programme focused on economics, working life and entrepreneurship. It offers an immersive game arena where Year 9 students compete as business leaders in international markets.

The full programme includes teacher training, five Yrityskylä lessons, a game session in our game arena and final reflection.

This school year, 91% of Finnish Year 9 students – more than 55,000 secondary school students – are expected to take part in Yrityskylä Secondary school.

The programme uses a gamified digital learning environment consisting of five lessons that align well with guidance counselling and social studies curricula.

Teacher Dashboard for thousands of teachers

The new Teacher Dashboard by JA Finland is an online service designed to enable schools in partner municipalities to adopt and use JA’s educational programmes with ease. These programmes are ready-made learning packages that include materials for both teachers and students.

Users of the Teacher Dashboard include educators in comprehensive schools, upper secondary schools and vocational institutions.

Starting in spring 2025, the dashboard will be used to deploy services for approximately 150,000 students each academic year.

A long-term partnership rooted in co-creation

We have designed and developed the services. Yet, more important than individual projects is the scale and continuity of our partnership with JA Finland: together, we are committed to long-term collaboration through an ongoing development model that ensures each of the four services continues to evolve and improve.

We also maintain these four services – as well as several other JA web services.

We asked our key contacts at JA – Development Manager Antti Ruohomäki and Senior Specialist in Service and Content Development Jesper Lempiäinen – to share their thoughts on our collaboration:

“Working together has gone – and continues to go – really well. Choosing a new application development partner is always a little nerve-wracking, but our experience with Into has been nothing but positive. Communication with the project team has been easy and natural from the very beginning, and we’ve received just the right amount of support and challenge to strengthen our own thinking. The careful planning phase helped us avoid several pitfalls along the way. Most of all, the relaxed and positive team spirit has supported our work and dialogue – and there’s been no shortage of humour either.”

“To sum up, the end results are excellent. We’re particularly happy with how smoothly the implementation in schools has gone – almost unnoticed, and with relatively little support needed. In teachers’ day-to-day lives, there’s limited time to learn new systems, so the fact that everything rolled out so effortlessly speaks volumes about the success of the project. Feedback and experiences from students have also been very positive, which of course matters just as much. All in all, we couldn’t be more pleased with the applications as a whole.”