Inspiration
There’s a time in everyone’s life where finances become an very important. In our case, as college students, we tend to begin looking for information, especially for developing personal finances. Unfortunately, we are overwhelmed by the industry, the terms associated to finance, and many other complicated concepts and/or procedures. Hence, we created SmartPenny to better the lives of the youth all the way up to to the elderly.
What it does
SmartPenny is currently a free and open website which is an overall game that allows a user to create an account with the company. You essentially create an account to login with and choose whether to play our game, meet piggy (our financial advisor), or see your current funds in your piggy bank. If you would like to play our game and earn funds to save or spend you are welcome to do so. Another page we have is one with a list of resources with financial literacy terms for you to learn from as well as a link to usmint.gov to further educate people in the area of personal finance. And lastly, we have a page of virtual products for you to buy from using your SmartPennines and a login/sign out a plug-in that would allow you to leave.
How we built it
In terms of building it, we started off with our idea of helping people in terms of financial management such as saving and spending. We went with creating a website through Wix because it was both efficient and user-friendly given our time constraints. Through HTML and css, we were able to come up with a theme and manipulate the code and data to match our needs. As a summary, we worked both in the backend and frontend of the website while having a clear of our client and customer base in mind.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was coming up with an idea. We knew that Finance consisted of a wide spectrum of areas such as money and credit markets, investing, and financial management. I think after looking at all three and deciding its necessity to society, we went with financial management on an individual-based need. A few other challenges we came across were creating a name, logo, and slogan for the company. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed but after looking at other resources and trying to compose new ideas, we ended up with a nice set of three.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A few accomplishments we are proud of are that we really were able to manage our time properly as a team. There were instances where one wasn’t able to make it but we all communicated properly to really see our learning platform that uses fame to help the youth learn and make better financial decisions from a young age succeed. We are also very proud of the uniqueness of our brand versus the competitors already out there. We admire the potential of our product and see it having a massive impact on society.
What we learned
We learned that every idea takes lots of time and patience in terms of thinking. Whether it was adding our logo or creating the website itself, we all needed to come together in a shared effort to see the product succeed. In terms of finance, we learned that there really is a breadth of information and resources within the industry. Another thing we learned was that regardless of winning or not winning, at the end of the day it’s people you work with and the experience that you come out with which is something we all received.
What's next for SmartPennies
We definitely had more ideas for SmartPenny such as targeting younger age groups (specifically those from 10-20), adding a feature to see the funds in each person’s PiggyBank get added and subtracted, and placing more games to give individuals the opportunity to earn more SmartPennies. There was a tremendous amount of potential for the product but in the end, we made it available for everybody. Since the shop could not be edited in HTML, we decided to keep the Wix link to that.
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