As students, we do not have a good understanding of personal finance which is important for the real world. After some research, we learned that this is an issue for many adults because of how finance is not taught enough in schools. To help students learn about personal finance, we turned it into a story game with Coineage.
The user can choose a story to play, each with a character that is dealing with a different aspect of personal finance: budgeting, retirement savings, investment, and joint finance. Each story will take the user through an educational story about how the character handles their financial situation with questions along the way.
We started using Qoom to build our website collaboratively with HTML/CSS/JS but switched to VS Code and Github due to technical difficulties.
One challenge was figuring out how to format our website with our story since we each had our own ideas. After some discussion, we decided to have multiple pages for different steps to keep each topic separate and help us divide tasks. We also decided on simplifying our website by not implementing too many options for the user to control.
We are proud of how well we were able to collaborate by having several meeting throughout the hackathon to brainstorm, design, and debug. We are also proud of how we designed our website so that it includes both the story and educational information and problems to allow the user to have fun while learning.
Learning is an ongoing process. Within a span of 2 days, we have grown as individuals and learned to brainstorm, collaborate, and communicate efficiently to be able to meet each other’s standards and finish the project in a timely manner. We were able to learn a new IDE, Qoom, and strengthen our skills in HTML/CSS/JS.
In two days, we were able to convey the core purpose of our website through one storyline, and it provided the main basis of our website. We plan to implement additional stories that can extend to multiple people, such as a couple or a family. This would allow the users to apply the financial lessons they have learned about and apply it to further situations, not just for themselves.