FINSIM

Inspiration

We looked at the digital game "spent" and realized that it can effectively be moulded into a game about financial literacy. After our team played the game, we noticed how much we learnt and how we felt attached to the game.

What it does

Our solution is a financial simulation game. It provides 4 options every round from which the user picks one. From there, the repercussions of their choice is shown and the program explains the best choice. The simulation starts at 18 years old up to 65 years. It splits up the choices based on stages of life (e.g. 18-23, 24-29...)

How we built it

We initially started out building the application with Java, but due to time limitations, we built the prototype with power-point. We will continue to build the application on Java.

Challenges we ran into

One problem we ran into was that if we had each of the 4 options per page lead to a completely unique gameplay, we would have to code for over 10^30 unique pages, so instead we built sections- which causes unique gameplay in that section- but not others- reducing the number of unique pages by a factor of 10^27.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how high quality our solution turned out to be by the end of the weekend. We expected to only have the time for a crude solution but it is very fine-tuned and looks good. We are also proud of our idea- we spent all of Saturday morning brainstorming!

What we learned

We leant the power of skill diversity. We noticed how when our group has very different people, there are plenty great ideas from perspectives we don't expect- we really used the best of all worlds. We also became much better at time management over the weekend as we had little time to code a sophisticated solution.

What's next for FINSIM

We plan to commercialize this software and sell licences to organizations while keeping it free for individuals. These organizations will get added functionality (such as in-game admin privileges, and local leaderboards). We plan to implement this using "CockroachDB"- a database type we learnt over a workshop this weekend.