School ends in less than two weeks. Attention spans at Centennial High School were as long as shadows on a rainy morning last week. But Kathy Thiebes was pleased at how engaged her first-period economics class was.

"They seem to be pretty into it," she says midway through class.

Thiebes normally holds their interest quite well with her semester-long classroom contest featuring play money, salaries, rentable desks, cellphone fines and the kids' own capitalistic schemes.

But Friday, the fifth-year teacher tried something at my request -- a tool that researchers think holds promise in improving our nation's faltering financial know-how.

Video games.

You can go anywhere for financial tips -- blogs, newspapers (ahem), multi-page pamphlets and guidebooks. You can even send your 10-year-old to money-management camp in California. It's called Camp Millionaire.

The Doorways to Dreams Fund, a foundation co-founded by Harvard University financial management professor Peter Tufano, is launching its second online financial literacy game this week. Its first,

, the one Thiebes unveiled to her class, has been live for more than a year. Developers say it's shown early success in educating players about such concepts as Annual Percentage Rates and enhancing their confidence.

They're hardly alone in embracing the genre. Researchers and financial giants elsewhere have used virtual worlds to teach financial literacy ... and, in the case of one new for-profit, entice investors.

None of the games from Doorways (D2D Fund for short) will beat Grand Theft Auto for creativity awards. They aim instead for the casual gamer who dabbles in

or

the 18- to 35-year-old woman who doesn't earn a large income but balances the family checking account, with limited confidence and knowledge.

"They don't know what APR is," explains Nick Maynard, who directed the game's development, "yet they already have a credit card."

It's a noble effort, when not aligned circumspectly with marketing. And it's sorely needed.

Just over one-quarter of young adults correctly answer basic questions on interest rates, inflation and diversifying risk,

co-authored by Dartmouth College economics professor Annamaria Lusardi. Females fared worse than males.

Oregon and most other states don't require high schoolers to take a personal finance class before they graduate. It's up to individual schools or teachers to incorporate it. Yet teachers, generally, aren't very confident addressing it. Nearly half of K-12 teachers report feeling "not very competent" instructing on saving and investing,

by the University of Wisconsin.

It doesn't help that most parents struggle to serve as good role models. Nearly half of the adults surveyed last year in the U.S. say they weren't sure they could come up with $2,000 in one month to pay for a financial emergency, Lusardi reported.

And the global financial crisis has undermined our youth's confidence.

University of Arizona students found a significant drop between 2008 and 2009 in how they rated their own financial knowledge. The drop was twice as steep for women as for men.

Confidence is one area officials at the D2D Fund hope to boost with their games -- which should total four by year's end. Engagement is another.

"Truth be told, it's not that fun to sit through eight hours of personal finance information," says Timothy Flacke, co-founder and director of D2D Fund, which aims to help lower-income families build wealth. "In general, we learn by doing. We learn by getting quick feedback about the choices we pick. The actual process of playing the games is really the better way."

The Council for Economic Education had reached the same conclusion when it launched its own free online game,

, in March. Researchers at Ohio University and the University of Wisconsin also have experimented with financial literacy games. Visa, bless its dear heart, offers online games to teach "financial management skills," including a soccer game, with Visa-branded lesson plans for teachers.

Another for-profit venture,

., last month launched K

. It's not an educational tool but an investment platform designed to look like a video game. Founders eventually hope to open to real security trading.

Unlike most of these other financial games, you'll find no pop quizzes in D2D's Celebrity Calamity. Instead, players get to manage a celebrity's earning and shopping while avoiding a Whitney Houston-Lindsey Lohan-like debt-acle or getting fired.

Thiebes' 12 juniors on Friday used the arrows on their keyboards to maneuver a stick figure to catch money falling from the sky. They also had to decide whether to nab dresses, iPods and other items on the celebrities' wish list.

"Just so you know," Thiebes warned at the start, "money falling from the sky does not happen in real life."

At breaks, they had to choose whether to charge purchases to a credit card or debit them from savings. Those catching too many high-priced items found themselves slapped with overlimit fees or finance charges. Those catching too little stash risked angering the celebrity -- Alice Albudget or Buster Buyin -- and losing their job.

Soon Thiebes' students settled into their swivel chairs, and they found that using a credit card raised its credit limit. Yet their celebrity's impulsive buying could easily knock them over the limit, drain their checking account and require them to carry a monthly balance.

As the game progressed, voices rose. Players bemoaned aloud their celebrities' sudden purchases -- "What! A plane?" exclaimed Cameron Turner -- and their credit cards' capriciously volatile Annual Percentage Rates -- "60 percent APR?" Kevin Gilgan asks. "How'd that happen?"

In the end, eight of the 12 students gave the game high marks.

"It gets interesting once you get into it," says Ibrahim Trad, 16.

"I learned I hate credit cards," Stephanie Wheeler says.

Turner, 18, an avid gamer (his favorite is Need for Speed), says he didn't mind Celebrity Calamity's more rudimentary, stick-figure graphics nearly as much as he did its "big, random fees." He rated it a 5 out of 5 -- not bad for a student Thiebes says had struggled to engage in the class.

Chasing after money is the part of the game designed to take the stress out of financial management, Maynard says. By balancing another person's finances and curbing their splurging habits, Maynard says, the game injects players with more confidence about managing their own money.

"That's why there's flight simulators for pilots," he added. "It's practice," he says.

Later this week, the nonprofit introduces its latest game,

, at a conference on underbanked Americans. Maynard describes the game as "So You Think You Can Dance" meets Budgeting 101 -- a topic that causes recoil at any age. Choreographed dances and music liven it up, he says. D2D Fund plans two more new releases later this year. With only a $1 million budget, it's looking to partner with schools, workplaces and credit unions to market the games.

"We know there's more games to be made because we keep the topics specific and limited," Maynard says. "We need just more of them."

Do their lessons stick long term? Preliminary research shows that players report more knowledge and confidence tackling their own finances, D2D Fund says. But we're still waiting for the Simon Cowells of academia to determine whether the lessons stick and actually change behavior.

For now, Thiebes believes it can be another tool in an increasingly desperate warchest.

"I did not have a single student get distracted while playing the game," she says, ".. which is pretty impressive for a rainy Friday."

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does not give financial advice but welcomes comments and questions, as well as invites to Ms. Pac-Man tourneys. Reach him at 503-221-8359.