Jean-Claude Trichet: Educational games “€conomia” and “Inflation Island” Remarks by Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, at the launch event for the educational games “€conomia” and “Inflation Island”, Frankfurt am Main, 8 December 2010. * * * Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like to welcome you all to this launch event here today – in particular the students and teachers who accepted our invitation. I also extend a warm welcome to all the other visitors, notably the ECCO colleagues and media representatives – and to ECB staff members who have worked on this project. In recent years, central banks have become important communicators and since its founding in 1998 the ECB has engaged on several avenues to broaden its outreach. The ECB was the first major central bank in the world to hold a press conference immediately after the Governing Council meeting to explain its monetary policy decisions. We publish a monthly bulletin for specialised audiences. We have educational videos on our website for the general public, we have games for children and of course we have our general publications. In 2010, our website was visited approximately 25 million times. Every year, around 13,000 people visit the ECB and we talk to them about the economy and our work. But there is always room for further improvement. And this is no time for complacency. We want to reach out to you – young people who have grown up in a networked, multimedia world. So we decided to develop games like these because their interactivity and playfulness could help enhance the learning experience. Today we are launching “€conomia” and “Inflation Island” on our website, and we will continue our work on such tools in the next few years. We expect the games to make this institution and its activities more accessible. The games are available in 22 European languages. You have just been playing against each other in “€conomia” and I hope you found it interesting and fun. But perhaps it wasn’t so easy to keep inflation low and stable, in line with our definition of price stability: less than 2%, but close to 2%. If that was the case, then the games have already served a purpose, because in real life it is challenging to keep inflation low and stable. Developing, producing and translating both games was quite a challenge as well. I’d like to thank everyone who has worked on the two games over the past year – the Directorate Communications, which is responsible for the project, ECCO members, experts from DG Economics and DG Market Operations, the language and software specialists. Let me now officially launch the games [by sending a tweet on Twitter and pushing a button to link of the game on the ECB’s Website]. Now it’s my pleasure to hand over the certificates and prizes. In equal 4th place are the European School of Frankfurt and the ISF International School Frankfurt [hands over the certificates] In third place is Lycée Français Victor Hugo [hands over the certificates and prizes] In second place is Friedrich-Dessauer Gymnasium [hands over the certificates and prizes] And the winner is Liebigschule [hands over the certificates and prizes] Congratulations!