Grand Theft Assets

An educational game designed to teach high school and middle school students basic financial literacy.

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Inspiration

As high school students, we understand the difficulties of being thrust into an unfamiliar world of incredibly important choices, especially in relation to finances. Because of this, we wanted to create a game to educate others as well as better ourselves and shape the future by making financial education a little easier.

What it does

The main page splits into two aspects. One side involves the actual lesson. The other side leads to a javascript narrative game. The game follows the story of Carmen Sandiego, a young and ambitious thief who seeks to better her future. In this game, she does this by attempting to steal from a bank. In order to do this, she poses as a bank employee, and much to her surprise, she is accosted by customers asking her their financial questions. As the player, you have the ability to help her answer these questions or evade the customers. If you answer correctly, you help Carmen successfully pull of her heist, all the while, learning more about and practicing your financial knowledge. If you answer incorrectly, she is sent back to the beginning, desperate the try again and give you another chance to succeed.

How we built it

The backend for this website was written using express js. The pages were created with HTML and CSS, and interactions between the pages were run using AJAX. The game itself was written using javascript. The server is hosted on amazon web services, and was later put onto the domain, grandtheftassets.tech.

Challenges we ran into

We had never used Amazon Web Services before and did not begin to introduce it until the website was mostly finished. This caused us to run into issues during the integration process. Furthermore, this was our first time using a canvas in javascript and attempting to understand the intricacies of redrawing sprites and frames was a long learning process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully implementing the aforementioned new techniques (Amazon Web Services and Javascript games).

What we learned

We learned how to host a website on Amazon Web Services (using lightsail), how to create a javascript game, and how to run an express server on the localhost.

What's next for Grand Theft Assets

We hope to integrate databased into our website to further diversify the content we can teach or asses. We would also like to make the game more complicated by adding in randomized questions and more mobility for the characters. We would also like to improve navigation within the game pages.

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