capitalia

Inspiration

How many times have you all heard teenagers complain that they haven’t received “a proper financial education on investments, loans, savings? Or maybe you were one of them? Nowadays, people like Warren Buffett earn billions from investments and we, as students, can’t even figure out what a mutual fund is or what is the difference between a stock and a bond! We, the team of Capitalia, decided to change that. This was the beginning of capitalia!

capitalia:

capital - wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing.

-ia - suffix which forms abstract nouns of feminine gender.

What it does

We came up with an idea to build a platform in the form of a web application for teenagers that will be used to inform, actively educate, inspire to achieve more while entertaining at the same time! In the beginning, the user can choose from three sub-games which will educate teenagers about Investments, Loans, Savings. But don’t be discouraged, the experience is entertaining and engaging:

When the user clicks on each, they will be transferred to an interactive game which will include puzzles, crosswords, trivia quizzes, pop-up challenges, and many other things.

In order to educate them about investments, the gamer will initially have 3000$ and they will have 5 investing options ordered in terms of risk to choose from:

1. Treasury bills 2. Cash deposit into a bank 3. Bonds 4. Mutual funds 5. Shares

In case the gamer doesn’t know about a type of investment, they can simply click on it and the explanation pops up with a real-world example based on the data from opensource: World Bank Open Data.

Next, they have an option to invest portions of their money, where they will decide what would be the best option for them. The user hits the “Deposit" the money option, activating the simulation which will determine if they gained or lost their money. The simulation will then run and will show the result based on the market situation.

In the future, we will make it even more interactive by adding an animated girl who will be a news reporter and will tell the news about the current market. Thus, we will not give out the explanation for their loss, rather they will have to figure out themselves as if they have invested the money and can hear the news from TV. There will be four runs (quarters of the year), after which the gamer will either lose or gain money.

The ultimate goal is not to gain money, rather not to lose the 3000$ they had or not to lose even more.

How we built it

We built this website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We first built the homepage, which just consisted of the contact info, then we built the actual game page, which consisted of boxes that allowed for user input, and they could input how much they wanted to invest.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into was the time constraint. We were originally going to make it more complicated, with animations, pictures, and use machine learning to gather open source data related to real world finance. However, since we had the time constraint, we were unable to do so, and just made it a game where users submitted how much they invested, and got out the risk factor.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since for the majority of the team, this was the first hack, we are extremely proud of our baby Capitalia, which was initially put on the table during the brainstorming. It has grown just as much as every one of us did: we communicated and united as a team by bringing the best skills from each of us and helping out to fill those areas we identified as our “weak” ones.

What we learned

We learned that in order to dream big, we need to work hard. Since the time constraint was only 24 hours, we had to adjust our expectations according to our skillset which has definitely grown, but it was not enough to create an interactive game just yet. Instead, we focused on getting as far as we can, which was one of the major things we had to realize in order to perform our best.

What's next for capitalia

We will work on improving the “Investment” game first, we will add an animated girl which will announce the world news as the text is being typed. Then, it will be time for the other two games. During the simulation runs or transactions, we will input quotes from famous people, interesting facts, “statistics of the day”. Moving forward, it would be amazing if we can also create an app that can be downloaded on IOS or Play Market.