A Day in the Life of a First-Generation Low-Income Student

Inspiration

We were inspired by the game SPENT (link to play: link. It's a story driven game that walks you through the life of a low income American with a child. You have to budget your finances and if your money drops to 0 you lose the game. We used this game as a loose model for our game, which can be seen through similarities such as the screens with facts and data, as well as linked resources to help. We were able to play through SPENT ourselves and we found that a game with a clear objective is extremely effective in conveying and educating users about real issues in a way that's engaging and entertaining.

What it does

The objective of this project is to provide insight into the struggles first-generation low-income students face and the effect of those issues on mental health. This game also aims to show solidarity to those impacted and to provide mental health resources and support. We strive to accomplish this in a manner that not only educates the user, but also in a way that feels engaging rather than simply reading an article about the topic. We chose to represent this using a collection style game. The game is supposed to represent the difficult decisions FGLI students are thrown each and every day. We force the user to make difficult decisions that could impact their near future so they can understand a fraction of the stress real FGLI students go through.

User guide

There are three levels/parts to the game. Each level is introduced with a scenario such as studying for your final vs. working. The user selects an option by clicking the corresponding button on the screen. Once the user makes the choice, they will enter a collection style game controlled by the left and right directional keys where the objective is to collect 5 of the chosen object. By the end of the game, players will have made 3 choices and played the collection game thrice. At the end, the program provides links to websites and foundations that either provide mental health support or links to donate to mental health initiatives.

How we built it

We built our project using Replit with JavaScript, using p5.js, an open-source beginner friendly library in JavaScript. As beginners, we didn't really have roles since we haven't learned enough about programming to have begun to specialize in anything. Instead, we all did what we could, and since two of us had some experience using p5.js, one of us built most of the code structure and the other did troubleshooting and debugging, while our other teammate did research on the topic and provided facts and sources for our project.

Challenges we ran into

There were quite a bit of challenges and issues we ran into during the process of building the project. One such problem was that since we were a group of all beginners, we had trouble starting the project since we didn't really know what to do. We also all have limited coding knowledge so having some ideas being unavailable to us due to lack of technical skill was also frustrating at times. However, we did eventually settling on a project, taking into account our past coding knowledge as well as the viability of the idea by looking at previous projects made by others that were similar. We also originally had a group of 4 but our 4th member unexpectedly left the day the hackathon began. Another set of problems we ran into were technical difficulties. We had a couple of bugs in the code that were relatively difficult to pinpoint because none of us had much experience in co-op coding and the code format others use are bound to be different from your own so sometimes it was troublesome to navigate the code. There were also some issues regarding pushing the Replit code to Github where the files wouldn't transfer for some reason. However, despite this all we were still able to push through to the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

None of us had ever done a hackathon before so we're all proud that we were able to create what we planned. We all have little to no coding experience, with only two of us having basic knowledge of p5.js, so it was a huge feat to successfully create a mostly complete program just over the weekend, even if it might seem basic to those who have more experience. This project also showed us that all of our skills are valuable, even skills that don't seem to correlate a lot to common skills hackathon's encourage such as experience in multiple languages and more complex computer science related skills. Regardless of our ability to code, all the contributions made to the project were invaluable and helped us progress forward.

What we learned

We learned that even if you don't know how to code in multiple languages or how to use different tools or APIs, you can still take what you do know and create something unique. All we knew going into the hackathon was how to make very basic games on p5.js, but we didn't let that demotivate us from coming up with an idea that can make knowledge and education on FGLI issues accessible to young people. Those of us who didn't know how to code were still able to contribute massively by writing vital information down, collecting sources, and adding personal experiences as a first-generation low-income student.

What's next for A Day in the Life of a First-Generation Low-Income Student

We hope that our game can reach students and young kids who may not be familiar or ignorant to the struggles first-generation low-income students face. We hope this will broaden people's perspectives and teach them something new, as well as for them to be more empathic to real issues their peers may have to face daily. In the future, we hope that the game can be continue to be improved, such as by updating it with a more intuitive UI/UX or adding more paths in the storyline and graphics to make the experience more immersive. When we gain more coding experience, this project can be revisited to be created as a website using HTML and CSS instead of relying on a library like p5.js.

Built With

• javascript
• p5.js
• replit