Kredible

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Kredible Text

Inspiration

Finances are confusing. Understanding where your money goes and how to optimize it requires expertise, no doubt, but also an intuition fostered from childhood. From our vantage point, exposure to financial education and the normalization of financial discourse are two advantages not everyone has access to--keeping economic disparities as widely ranging as they are. We set out to change this through providing an accessible financial education for younger children who might not otherwise be exposed to concepts like credit and saving. For our first iteration, we focused on understanding and maintaining a good credit score.

What it does

Kredible is an educational game for children 8+ aimed at promoting financial literacy. Through completing random acts of kindness, users get money tokens. They can use these tokens to take care of their pet, buying it different types of foods. As they spend and save, their credit score fluctuates according to a simplified algorithm replicating the three main impacting factors on real-life credit score: payment history, amount owed, and duration of credit (play). By experimenting with credit scores in an accessible and fun environment, children gain familiarity with the real-world systems and are more likely to make strategic financial choices in their own lives going forward.

How we built it

Used React for frontend, Express for backend
Used Firebase API to authenticate users
Use Twilio SMS API to send messages to parents reminding to verify their children's random acts of kindness
Netlify for deploying to a website, which we got from domain.com!

Challenges we ran into

FirebaseDB recent update
Accessing and setting states in the correct order
Integrating Twilio SMS into React app
Credit score algorithm derivation and implementation

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Enjoyable user experience despite educational material

What we learned

Credit score calculation (our own understanding was helped by Kredible!)
Getting comfortable with React and Firebase
Using the Twilio SMS API

What's next for Kredible

Refining our simplified credit score calculating algorithm
Include references to "good" and "bad" credit; introduce win/lose feature
Customizable pet/enhanced graphics
Introduce market feature, where users can buy more than just food for their pet, and access is restricted by credit score
More dynamic UI/UX; enhanced gaming features
Develop verification system to hold users accountable for random acts of kindness
Expanding to include other complex financial concepts (credit vs. debit, retirement/mortgage features; multiple lines of credit correlating to multiple pets)

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