This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.
Educating our next generation is the key to a successful future. We believe that the understanding of money is crucial for the development of adulthood skillsets. A childhood favourite, "Lemonade Stand," inspired our game. All About the Dough is a game-based educational web app to teach children basic financial literacy concepts such as budgeting, needs and wants, and sales tax. "All About the Dough" is a game geared towards girls between the ages of 10 to 15.
After analyzing the existing products and competitors, we found that there is a white space for a "game-ified" app that teaches teens about finances. Although schools teach a lot about the principles of mathematics, we found that the applications of math in finance are lacking.
##Key Concepts After reviewing multiple education sites and government sources for financial literacy, we have identified the following concepts to teach our audience:
- The difference between needs and wants
- How to budget
- Saving money and planning for the future
- Calculate expenses, revenue, and profit
We started with brainstorming what we want the game to look like, which tools we want to use, then split up into frontend and backend subteams. The front end is built using the React-ANT framework, the backend of this app is built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using Javascript. The app is deployed on Heroku.
GCP was challenging to implement. We created an API but we found the calls have a lot of errors. We never used GCP and some of us never used React. Two of us were setting up git for the first time on our computers. It was challenging to implement the features we wanted, troubleshoot in an unfamiliar environment, and connecting the frontend and backend. StackOverflow was helpful most of the time, but not always. Thankfully, there are helpful mentors to advise us.
We are proud of the UI and how easy it is to interface with the game. We also appreciate the enriching experience of learning git, React, and GCP through practice.
For future improvements, we would scale our application to run smoothly on desktop and mobile interfaces. We would like to add more "types" of teaching. Instead of just quizzes, we would like to include other games to encourage learning and making the knowledge "stick".