Inspiration
As a team of college students looking to soon make independent financial choices, we have become all too aware of a lack of preparation and resources to understand the importance and best practices of becoming financially independent.
What it does
FinEd is your gateway to financial empowerment. Picture a streamlined and user-friendly website designed exclusively for students, where personal finance becomes a breeze. With FinEd, you can effortlessly master the essentials of financial literacy.
Our mission is clear: to provide you with the tools and knowledge you need to navigate the complex world of personal finance. We decided to take a step towards a more equitable and accessible personal finance education system by developing FinEd, a learning system for students, by students. Say goodbye to financial jargon and hello to intuitive, easy-to-understand lessons. Whether you're looking to budget effectively, build credit, or invest wisely, FinEd has you covered.
Why struggle to understand the intricacies of personal finance when you can have it all at your fingertips? Discover a wealth of resources, interactive tutorials, and real-life scenarios that make learning about money management engaging and fun. We believe that financial education should be accessible to all, and that's why FinEd is here.
How we built it
We built FinEd in two different stages. The first was an educational section where the user learns the content for a given financial topic. The second was the game design stage, where the user can test their knowledge, where we created a user-focused and intuitive app to enter homebuyer data and check the eligibility to buy a home based on financial analysis, also offering suggestions for ineligible homebuyers.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was creating the interface for the multiple choice questions and incrementing the score when the correct answer button was clicked. However, after researching HTML, we were able to implement the game with full functionality. We also had to essentially learn JavaScript as an obstacle in implementing our user interface.
Accomplishments
Accomplishments we're proud of, besides successfully being able to implement a learning and game section, include learning and exploring how to work with various user interfaces platforms, such as repl.it, GitHub, and VSCode. We're also proud of coding both backend and frontend in less than 24 hours, utilizing knowledge of frontend languages like CSS and HTML in tandem with backend languages like JavaScript . We realized that our proudest accomplishments were more about the learning experience than what we were able to code: experiences like learning about the existence of new platforms despite not using them, or trying and failing to make the container work for the multiple choice question interface, taught us the most.
What we learned
We learned to code and implement various user interface platforms such as repl.it, GitHub, and VSCode. Additionally, successfully coding both frontend and backend components within a tight 24-hour timeframe showcased our versatility with languages like CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. However, our proudest accomplishments revolve around the continuous learning experiences, which exposed us to new platforms and the intricacies of UI development.
What's next for FinEd
Although there were many ideas we had for FinEd, some features were simply infeasible to implement in the timespan of 24 hours. As such, some future plans for FinEd include developing a full mobile app to expand accessibility to users nationwide, connecting users to compete in the game against each other and send scores to friends. We plan to improve the score tracking functionality by keeping track of high score, and implementing a rewards system to earn badges once a certain number of points are reached and an incremental system in the number and types of personal finance topics are completed. Creating a Menu Bar would also help with easy navigation to move to different sections and to go back between questions in a “test your knowledge” game section. Incorporating additional features, such as the ability to add additional types of games to reinforce the vocab and topics, or a streak count for number correct questions can revolutionize the future of learning personal finance in a fun and engaging way.
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