Dino Dollars

Start page for the program
Example activity within Dino Dollars
Another example of a portion of the program
A section of the Dino Dollars website (for downloading the software)

Inspiration

This program was created with the intent of drastically amplifying the reach and engagement of a previously established passion project.

Reality Clarified through the Lens of Economics is a book Ahmad crafted in hopes of promoting economic literacy among Lebanese young adults as a sustainable aid to the Lebanese economic crisis.

Upon returning to Lebanon, his fatherland, for the first time since the commencement of the Lebanese economic crisis, it became apparent to him that one of the most powerful oppressive tools in Lebanon is people’s dependency on corrupt leadership. “If we, Lebanese, don’t understand the basics of how money flows through an economy and how a nation supplies its economy with resources, corruption will forever plague our country. No matter how fair the game of democracy is, it will always play into the hands of the corrupt if everyone does not have the resources to adequately play.”

The project proved to have potential as approximately 600 copies of the book have been distributed to various public high schools in Lebanon.

The two major limitations of this project was distribution and accessibility on a global scale as well as the youth’s engagement with the book. Dino Dollars was created with the objective of not only rectifying these drawbacks but making them our biggest strengths.

What it does

We essentially built a child/teen oriented interactive story through which our audience may work towards becoming economically literate. Our story line is not only engaging but proves to be continuously coherent as it’s constructed around recurring themes, places, events and actions, all of which are grounded in the day to day life of our target audience. Consequently we are able to truly accentuate the applications of economics without compromising nuanced theory.

The game tests the user's new economic knowledge throughout the adventure allowing them to make connections between different concepts and learn the real-world applications of their knowledge. By the end of the game, the user should be able to identify key economic concepts and understand how to apply them to their lives.

How we built it

From the programming side of things–Ren’Py was a familiar concept in the sense that much of its syntax was similar to Python, and we could even execute Python code from within the Ren’Py script. While Ren’Py did much of the heavy lifting in terms of code framework, there was still the task of writing a script, creating artwork, and making a website–and then bringing them all together into an application that both looks and executes smoothly.

We utilized the hackp.ac domain registrar to select and purchase the domain of our choice, then we used the integrated website software to build our Dino Dollars website.

Challenges we ran into

We knew we wanted to make an interactive learning experience from the start, but finding an applicable framework for such a project was an issue. For the project we wanted, we didn’t necessarily need all of the bells and whistles that come with game engines like Unity or Unreal, but we also didn’t want to have to write the application entirely from scratch. We stumbled upon Ren’Py–a game engine with its own unique scripting syntax–and chose for it to be our framework. Although on the surface it was easy to work with, we still ran into problems with having to familiarize ourselves with each of the tools that Ren’Py has to offer.

Our initial domain name was not registered with the preceding “https” portion of our site’s URL. This issue resulted in a safety warning message appearing whenever users would attempt to access the link to our site. To fix this issue, we needed to register an SSL certificate for our domain. By utilizing the “LetsEncrypt Free SSL” option within the domain registrar, our team was able to troubleshoot this issue and remove the safety warning message users used to encounter.

What's next for Dino Dollars

Ultimately, accessibility is at the forefront of our project’s mission. One of the next objectives for the project would be translating it into various different languages. Transferring the application to make it accessible on different mobile platforms is also another goal of our team--as mobile phones become more commonplace around the world.

In the future, Dino Dollars plans to expand its platform beyond young children and educate teenagers, college students, and adults with a special focus on immigrants and other people new to their current economic system.