Inspiration
We were inspired to create this project in response to the persistent issue of financial illiteracy in the United States. We first noticed this phenomenon within our communities, where state budget cuts have led to the elimination of financial literacy education courses for youth. Yet upon further inspection, we saw how prevalent this problem was across all demographics. According to Fortune, over two-third of American adults cannot pass a simple financial literacy test. Countless other statistics indicate that there is a pressing need for financial literacy; 44% of Americans don’t have enough cash to cover a $400 emergency (Forbes), the majority of US adults (61%) have had credit card debt in the past 12 months (National Foundation for Credit Counseling) and 78% of U.S. workers live paycheck to paycheck (CareerBuilder).
What it does
Our interest in this social issue led us to build a game where we can teach and assess users’ financial literacy. Users start with $100 of fictional money in their “balance account” and money may be deducted from their balance based on whether they answer the question correctly. If they answer incorrectly, they are also provided feedback about the correct answer and links to further resources to learn about the content area they had more difficulty with.
How we built it & what we learned
We learned how to master using Git and GitHub, work with JSONs and integrate them with Python, and write modularized code. We started by researching what basic knowledge you need to be considered financially literate. From this research, we decided there were five main categories in financial literacy: budgeting and setting financial goals; paying builds and saving money; basics of loans (personal, debt, mortgages, etc.); credit cards and credit scores; and how investing works, 401(k)s, and the stock market. We compiled a question bank spanning these topics, allocating 5 questions to each (scaleable in the future to expand more categories and questions). This question bank is incorporated into our code as five different JSON objects within our Python files. We built a quasi-front-end called UI.py which displays all the prints that the user interacts with on the console. The back-end of our code is logic.py. This module handles all the interaction with the JSON files, extracting the data we need from them in order to isolate the multiple choice questions and check the user’s answers. The last python module is main.py. This is the point of entry for the code, meaning that upon running this the program is loaded.
Challenges we ran into & accomplishments that we are proud of
The challenges we faced came with being relatively more beginner with python, git and JSONs. Neither of us had ever worked with JSONs previously and one of us learned git/github the day of starting the project. The learning curve was initially a bit steep but by the end of the day, we managed to learn these new skills and apply them directly in our program, learning an immense amount in the process. We are proud of our teamwork because together we were able to self-teach many of these concepts within a short period of time and debug our code successfully, showing how important collaboration is within software development.
What's next for Financial Literacy Program
Both of us are on a gap year from Harvard (one international and one domestic student) so we hope to spend this time further developing the program to eventually bring it to organizations on campus, in Boston and abroad. Next steps include expanding the question bank and building an interactive web application for the program to run on. Furthermore, we hope to allow users to create profiles on the web application where they can store the assessments taken, track their progress over time, and interact with other individuals learning about financial literacy.
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