The Wage Worker of Wall Street

Inspiration

Although a financial literacy class is offered at our school, we were aware that there was not a mandatory FinLit class at every school, or even one offered as an elective. We strived to create a quick game and simulation that could teach students about the stock market while it wouldn’t take an obscene amount of time out of the teacher’s day to do something slightly off-curriculum - maybe just 15 minutes coupled with a worksheet.

What it does

The Wage-Worker of Wall Street is essentially a stock trader simplified. 8 stocks are available for buying and selling. The stocks follow historical market data for their sectors, and some stocks (like PEAR) are datapoint clones of companies from 2005 (PEAR is AAPL to clarify). The simulation runs for 2 years, split into 8 financial quarters. In each quarter, the game displays news that pertains to possible market trends, and the player can read these headlines and make decisions whether to buy, sell, or hold their stocks in a certain company. After each quarter, the player receives more news, and the game loop continues until September 1, 2007, whereupon the game ends, giving an ending screen and a summary of what you did with your available funds. Some stocks plummet, some are merely inflation hedges, and some are great investments.

How we built it

We used React, coupled with Bootstrap to create this application. It was interesting challenge to build our game using state-based architecture, meaning that our application was directly tied to all values related to the player. By updating stocks owned, or money, changes would be directly reflected in the application. We also used Github Pages to host the website.

Challenges we ran into

For Inesh, this was one of his first experiences using Git for collaborative version control. This led us to interesting moments of merging, pushing to the wrong branch, and just general fun with Git. More challenges we ran into was that we had a large scope for our project, and realized that actually achieving things would be much harder. Aidan was mostly focused on realizing the games core mechanics, and giving the developers a reality check when they were trying too hard. More challenges emerged from using React in ways it probably shouldn’t be, and monitoring the state of our application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We really like the news feature, as well as the stock trading screen (reminiscent of the deep rock galactic mineral trading screen). Tying everything together with React has also been satisfying, and it was great being to able to restart the game so easily by resetting the state.

What we learned

Don’t plan too much for a 24-hour hackathon! No, seriously. Don’t. We also learned how to better code within React, as it was a relatively new language for us.

What's next for The Wage Worker of Wall Street

We believe that this project has potential, and with some work, we can incorporate graphs, dividends, P/E ratios, and other important aspects of the market that we simply didn’t have time for, as well as expanding the scope of the game to include short-term spending, investing in retirement funds, and incorporating various random events.