I have my "alligator bucks" – play money that I give to my students as rewards for classroom points or for homework, etc.
In most of my classes, I give the students the bucks and they each have their little pouches or pencil cases where they store their money. Some put their dollars inside their smartphone cases, which is also a common place where they "hide" real cash, too.
I have many classes where the students have pooled their cash for specific events (like I will offer to sell a games-playing class event or "pizza party" for some amount) but the kids are always quite meticulous in their accounting for who has contributed what amount to the pool, and the "banker" role is always strictly temporary.
Then there is my Arcturus cohort. These kids set up a "banker," perhaps originally with the same of idea of pooling resources. But the student in charge, who goes by Gina, is a bit of a forceful personality. That's being polite – really, she's a bit of a bully, to be frank, and it's often an effort to keep her domineering ways in check. Anyway, she, of course, appointed herself banker. And now, no matter what, she collects all the cash earned by any student the class.
She keeps meticulous count of how much she has, how much is owed each day, but none of the students, nor her, have any accounting of who has what proportion of the total cash at this point. Thus she is more of a government agency or a feudal lord than a "bank."
I'm not totally happy with this situation at the moment, because a few times I've gotten hints (only hints, no kid will openly admit it) that not all the students want to be a part of this forced communitarian approach to holding alligator dollars. Gina currently holds more than 300 alligator bucks on behalf of her fellow students, and I think I'm going to have to come up with an exorbitantly-priced event of some kind, liquidate the bank, and then cancel the dollar system for a while.
But meanwhile, I see a sort of unintended social experiment unfolding, among 2nd and 3rd graders. I call it the People's Republic of Arcturus.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]