Market Master

Trading Simulation
Asset Selection Interface
Public-Access Leaderboard
Definitions

Inspiration

Not all learning takes place in classrooms or through textbooks. We fully sympathize with other students’ struggles with digesting complex concepts. To promote financial literacy in a fun and comprehensible way, we developed Market Masters, an immersive simulation game to educate the public on vital monetary knowledge.

What it does

Market Masters is an educational game targeted toward students and aspiring investors. The game is a simulation of the stock market, with many different investments (stocks, bonds, and ETFs) available to the player. It mimics both natural market fluctuations and changes attributed to national/international affairs. Players also receive randomized news headlines to interpret to their advantage. Resources such as built-in tutorials and educational hyperlinks are in place to guide players and maximize their learning opportunities. After the game ends, the player can choose to log their score into our database, where top players are displayed publicly, encouraging users to compete to become the best investor.

How we built it

Given the short timeframe, we decided to use VSCode Liveshare to collaborate in real-time and deter any code conflicts. As many people were working on the same codebase, we relied on Prettier to maintain a consistent code style and improve readability. Our website was built using SvelteKit, a framework for building apps in Svelte. Using SvelteKit serverless as our backend, we were able to integrate a leaderboard system with MongoDB as our database. One benefit of using serverless was that we only needed one code base so we could seamlessly collaborate. To style our website, we decided to use TailwindCSS with DaisyUI which increased our development speed as it mitigated navigation between files. To render the equations on our “stats for nerds page” we used KaTex, a Javascript library by Khan Academy.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we ran into some challenges with collaborating because each person on our team had different strengths. To reconcile our differences we decided to take advantage of tools such as VSCode Liveshare while communicating on Discord so we could quickly assign tasks and communicate. This proved to be very efficient; however, we sometimes ran into some problems where we were not able to test code as someone else was working on a breaking feature. Another downside of using Liveshare was that the host had to be online to collaborate, so we had to schedule when to work on the project together. Fortunately, through effective communication, we were able to overcome these challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to utilize the strengths of each person on the team effectively, whether that be coding, math, investing knowledge, or design. This allowed us to complete all the features that we initially brainstormed and thrive despite tight time constraints. We are also proud of the clean and professional interface, especially owing to Gabe’s hard work.

What we learned

Although our team had never worked together before, it was a pleasure learning to collaborate together. Furthermore, we learned to accurately visualize our final product before starting while complying with our expectations of being both informative and understandable for our targeted audience. Learning to use popular Javascript libraries like KaTex was also an enriching experience.

What's next for Market Master

We hope to add more detailed scenarios in which the player could experience multiple financial events happening at once, better mimicking a real-world scenario. Additionally, we could have implemented the game logic on the server side along with user authentication which would have decreased the possibility of client-side tampering.