Money Does Grow On Trees

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  Here is a picture of our game running on Trinket.

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  Saving money and playing among us is the best combo!

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  Credit cards have never been explained in simpler terms!

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  Here's one of our fun questions for a user to choose!

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  Here's one of an environmental wins!

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  Here is a final snapshot of what the ending looks like. In the future, we hope to create more days and analyze the stats more.

Inspiration

As women in STEM, we believe it is extremely important for people, especially youths, to have full knowledge and understanding of financial literacy, and be self-conscious about their personal environmental choices. As a team, we have drastically noticed that most adolescents are ill-equipped regarding the topics of finance and the environment. We have also realized the lack of education that schools give them about basic budgeting and even eco-friendly options. Thus, our team definitely hopes to educate the younger general population with the app we have created and to promote confidence in financial education and the health of the environment.

What it does

Money Grows on Trees is a text-based role-playing game aimed at educating women between the ages of 10 to 15 on finance as well as the environment. By letting the user go through an imaginary day in the life, Money Grows On Trees allows the user to see the long-term impacts of their day-to-day actions on their Finances and on the Environment.

How we built it

Money Grows On Trees was built with Python exclusively.

Challenges we ran into

The challenge we faced was deciding which language we should implement in our hack. At first, we wanted to use JavaScript. However, we were not very comfortable with that particular language. Then, through the advice of some mentors we contacted, we decided to choose python because the entire group was familiar with this language.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we're really proud of our idea. We would have loved to play this game when we were younger. We're happy to have been able to code it for our younger selves. We are also really proud of our communication. Attending a hackathon during a pandemic is quite the feat. It forces you to be staring at a screen constantly (which would have happened a lot in person as well) and have to connect over calls for debugging and going over ideas. We definitely felt the zoom fatigue, but we did it!

What we learned

As a team, we learned the importance of leadership, developing our ideas, and problem-solving. Since this was the first virtual hackathon the team attended, we learned how important communication is especially over Slack and Video Calls. We also refreshed our knowledge of personal finance and learned new terms. Through our research, we also learned new good practices for helping the environment.

What's next for Money Grows On Trees

In the near future, we would like to develop it into an app with numerous visuals, graphics, and sound effects to improve user engagement and enhance their experience. Additionally, we hope to further extend the game by adding different scenarios in order for preteens to learn about topics on investing, filing taxes, choosing clean energy sources, and zero-waste options. Also, we would create a website where the youth can access the game easily.

Built With

• python