Every year, two thirds of college seniors (about 1.8 million) in the US graduate with significant debts. Most of them are poorly equipped to manage their debts and make intelligent financial decisions. These same students are avid technology users and game players who learn effectively using computer games. Building on early successes of incorporating financial applications in programming courses and engaging students in game development, this project connects computing and personal finance education by teaching programming and financial literacy simultaneously using student-developed computer games. Programming courses are uniquely positioned to offer opportunities to help students improve financial literacy, but there have been no integrated courses to exploit this synergy. This project infuses financial literacy into seven computing courses and engages students to develop financial literacy games. A knowledge-sharing portal creates a collaborative learning environment for students to learn programming and financial literacy concurrently. Previous research shows that students' interests and learning outcomes improve when they address issues closely related to their daily lives. This project builds on the premise that games will be engaging and financial literacy is relevant to students' lives.
This cross-disciplinary project involves faculty members from three colleges. Each year, it directly impacts more than 550 undergraduate students in computing and other disciplines as well as over 60 high school students. The financial literacy games will be publicly accessible and the learning materials will be contributed to online course repositories for other institutions to use. Through journal publications, conference presentations, workshop demonstrations, and summer game development camps, the results of the project reach a broad audience that includes college instructors, K-12 teachers, researchers, practitioners, and students.
