Loonie Toonie

Giving kids the ability to explore financial freedom so that they can build confidence with money for the future.

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Inspiration

As children of immigrants, allowances were a foreign concept. With many parents just trying to make ends meet, many children did not get money handed to them. For the many children getting money at a younger age, they are able to develop certain habits and concepts such as budgeting and saving. These can develop through parental support with aids such as a multitude of apps that already exist for kids where the parent deposits money in a parent controlled child account. This allows for a more financially conscious future for these children. However, for the children that cannot use such apps, it can become much harder to enforce ideas such as budgeting if there aren't any stakes they have to deal with in real life. For many, this lack of knowledge can perpetuate into early adulthood, causing issues in terms of finance management, overall confidence and empowerment. We wanted to find a way to somehow create an environment where every children can learn all these concepts and experience the pros and cons of the financial decisions they make if not in real life. With this idea came the rise of Loonie Toonie

What it does

Loonie Toonie intends to simulate a gamified environment where children can make financial decisions and see the affects of them in real time, using points instead of actual money. Features include:

  • A story mode feature where player's interact with real life scenarios and attempt to make the best decision. What they pick can directly impact their stats.
  • A stats feature that keeps track of a player's energy, earnings, and credit card loans as they interact with the app.
  • Financial lessons and quizzes that acts as a player's job within the app. The more the player learns within our app, the more they earn.
  • A credit card feature where player's can take out loans but must pay said loans back

How we built it

We primarily utilized java and xml within android studio. In terms of user authentication and storage, we utilized firebase. We additionally utilized the Gemini API for a more tailored experience depending on the user.

Challenges we ran into

Time: We believe our idea was very ambitious relative to the time, especially considering the multitude of features we wanted to implement. Gemini API: This was out first time attempting to use Gemini API. Due to this, there were many hiccups along the way when trying to connect to the API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Idea: We believe the idea was not only educational but entertaining for a young audience. Additionally the idea was a mirror of real life with the story based choices and consequences. UI: We believe our UI was very appealing for a child as our target audience. The icons and colours were captivating and it ultimately looked like an engaging, lively app.

What we learned

When given a time constraint, it is important to set realistic goals. Even though our idea was something we were passionate about due to it's uniqueness, ultimately we should've taken into account our time when deciding on ideas that are most feasible.

What's next for Loonie Toonie

We hope to expand the lessons aspect by incorporating more financial concepts. We also hope to continue adding more tools and features so that it can mirror real life to a greater extent. Examples include loans, credit score and more but in a simplified manner.

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