Student Loan Game

Inspiration

As two college students going through undergraduate education, we realized that student loan debt, a multi trillion dollar issue in America alone, originates from college students that make poor financial decisions either due to lack of monetary control or lack of education regarding personal finances. This prompted us to think of an innovative yet still interactive solution to reduce this national epidemic; we ended up deciding on a creating a video game that simulates real-world experiences while teaching users crucial financial information.

What it does

Our game is designed to simulate real-world scenarios where banks or student loan repayment companies intentionally mislead people, preventing them from paying off their student debts. Our goal with this game is to prepare college students for these situations so that they can be better prepared and not have to jump through hoops in the future to pay off these debts. NOTE: We were not able to create the actual game due to our lack of experience, so we spent a lot of time learning new aspects of Java libraries and packages that we could use. Our submission lies more so in our ideation process and proof-of-concept that this is a huge problem that education by these means could solve.

How we built it/Challenges we ran into

We originally tried to build the game in various languages, but we decided in the end to use Java since both of us were relatively experienced with the language. This, however, brought us another road block in our limited knowledge of creating Java Apps. To combat this issue, we spent a lot more time than we should have, reading through any and all online material in regards to how to further along our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we're proud of our ideation process. We took the time to identify a major problem and thoughtfully brainstormed possible solutions and personas to assess the viability/usability of our game. Due to our lack of experience creating games in Java, we tried to learn as much as possible from online material. This dedication and education process is also something we're very proud of.

What we learned

We started the entire hackathon with a completely new project, but after discussing with a mentor, we determined that while it was an interesting idea, we did not have the technical capabilities to learn and execute within our given time constraints. IBecause our game idea still had many components but through our logic and reasoning skills, we decided to divide and conquer the work. This mentality of team cooperation especially considering that neither of us knew each other ahead of time, is something we learned is crucial to the success of any project or company.

What's next for Student Loan Game

Ideally, the next step for the Student Loan Game is to fully flush out the graphics in the UI popup, which functions like the game console. Once that step is finished, we would try and incorporate other aspects of personal finance such as long-term vs. short-term investments so that this game is more encompassing of financial issues and is able to appeal to a broader audience with different personas.

Built With

• java