When Life Gives You Lemons - A Financial Literacy Game

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Inspiration

Teaching children about financial literacy early, and ingraining money management skills at a young age can make it easier for them to maintain and develop good spending habits when they’re older. This is important in a world where costs incurred in a young adult’s life (especially the cost of college) keep increasing - according to the Institute for College Access and Success, “The average debt of students when they graduated from college rose from $18,550 (in 2004) to $28,950 (in 2014), an increase of 56 percent”. While something like college is an important investment, its high costs mean that many are stretched to the limit financially. Equipping kids with saving skills may help alleviate the burden of facing financial challenges to some extent.

What it does

The goal for our project is to provide an educational game that teaches financial literacy targeted at kids ages 6 to 14(first - eighth grade). The game we created simulates life in which the user plays through a storyline, learns the difference between wants and needs, as well as the general idea of saving, investing and spending money. The user plays the game by clicking the buttons yes or no, want or need allowing for easy navigation throughout the game.

How we built it

Coding in javascript and integrating it into code.org

Challenges we ran into

Our game is an oversimplification of daily life. The decisions we make throughout the day usually aren’t so black and white, as many factors play a role in how we use our finances. There is no right or wrong to whether one immediately spends money or not, so essentially the game might differ from one’s personal lifestyle of money habits. Thus, not everyone will be able to relate to the circumstances given in the game. The scenarios in our game are most common in American culture, and may not even be possible scenarios in other countries. Education that lacks a cultural connection to the audience it’s teaching is usually ineffective. Even within the United States, people of different economic status experience daily life very differently, and may not be able to relate to the game.

A challenge we ran into was integrating our javascript code into code.org as well as combining all our code we worked on separately together

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of learning elementary basics of a new language for many of us (javascript) and using what we know about languages we're familiar with and applying that to new circumstances. We're also proud of integrating different code done by different group members into a successful UI.