Compound

Our home screen
The different eras
Medieval Era
Renaissance Era
Roaring 20s
Modern Era

Inspiration

Financial literacy is one of the oldest survival skills of human history, but it's rarely taught that way. A medieval peasant deciding on how to ration their food to survive the winter faces the same struggle as a modern college student deciding on how to make their budget last the month. As advocates of financial literacy, we wanted to build a project that bridges the past and the present to set up the next generation of adults on the right track. That's why we built Compound, a museum where you can explore the financial decisions people were faced with in different eras.

What it does

Compound is a game where you explore four historical eras: medieval, renaissance, the roaring 20s, and modern day and the different events and financial decisions people faced in those eras. In every era, you make choices as a character of the time, learning core financial literacy concepts through a gamified experience. The knowledge builds with each era, and it all culminates in a modern day simulation where you analyze a real bank account and put everything you've learned to the test.

How we built it

We used React for the frontend and Vite for the development server. We used Capital One's Nessi API to simulate banking data. Claude came in clutch for the UI/UX, though we still had to spend many hours tweaking to make our vision come to life.

Challenges we ran into

We experienced both technical and design challenges. One of our biggest technical challenges was integrating the Nessi API. It went down at some point and we didn't realize, so a lot of time was spent running around in circles. We also struggled with dynamically adjusting the questions to match the banking data. As for design, we had to make a lot of difficult tradeoffs to have a presentable product in time. We wanted to add features like an interactive stock market, shop, powerups, etc. We also struggled with deciding what financial literacy topic fit best in every era, as many of them overlap.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of the scale of our project. We managed to implement 4 very different eras and teach several financial literacy concepts. The UI also looks quite nice, we added our own playful touch with our cat mascot.

What we learned

We learned that idea generation and planning is very difficult! We spent hours just coming up with an idea and then fully planning it out, almost half of our time was spent discussing various features and concepts. We also learned how to divide and conquer to accelerate our progress. We also enjoyed attending different workshops and learning about system design, scalable systems, and copilot.

What's next for most incredible project

There's many features that we wanted to add. As mentioned earlier, we wanted to add an interactive stock market, a mock shop, and a way for your actions in the previous eras to affect the modern day transactions. We also wanted to add more technologies like AI generated questions so that each playthrough feels unique.