Financial Literacy Challenge sponsored by VISA

Junior Achievement was recently invited to participate in the #Financial Literacy Challenge organized by Co-Creation Hub, sponsored by VISA http://cchubnigeria.com/financialliteracy-challenge-show-and-tell/ 
for the localization & digitization of Junior Achievement Nigeria’s Community board game used in JA Program - More Than Money. This is a fun game that JAN students love to play in the classroom, the team of developers did a great job in creating the mobile app and came in second place, congrats! Be on the look out at all mobile app stores for this fun game that teaches about saving, earning, and investing money, we will communicate when it is available and JAN students will get to play it for FREE! One of the developers shares his experience below:
 

The team was made up of brilliant people who are experts in what they do, which really allowed us to work together in a way that was a joy to be a part of. You could not tell from coming around, as we occasionally were all busy churning out code, or designs for the final product. If you have ever heard the saying that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts", this group really embodies that statement to the last letter.
 

 

The group consisted of Ikechukwu Obiakor, who handled illustrations for the scenery of the game, the app icons, and other pages. Dapo Olapo worked on graphics assets for the game, he did the painstaking work of designing each game card for all 34 available tiles on the game board, he really must be lauded for this, as well as providing the necessary assets for both Android, Web and J2ME devices that the developers needed to create a fun game. David Umoh worked on the HTML5 version of the game, this allows the game be available on any device with a web browser and today, that is pretty much every device. Sunday Akinsete brought his brilliant expertise with both mobile application development and excelling at Hackathons to the team and was able to develop a compelling user experience which thrilled the judges, the audience and even more so we the team members, knowing the record time it took to implement some features. Ajibola Aiyedogbon, myself, modeled the existing game board into an easily extensible and replaceable asset which everyone on the team could use. I also developed the J2ME version of the game, and was responsible for steering this team in the right direction. With all the great experience and personalities of the team, it was easy to coordinate efforts and ensure that we achieved our goal, which was to provide a compelling experience for the children that will play the game be excited about, and oh, lest I forget go home with gold.

 

The team would not be complete without mentioning the essential presence of Damilola Adenusi from Junior Achievement Nigeria who was ready to assist in any way possible, be it localizing content, or providing guidelines for how the game was played or even in coming up with our final presentation while we were all busy working toward a final product before the deadline. We are also very thankful for the presence of Sheri Adegbenro, albeit brief, but it had a profound effect as she worked with Damilola in localizing the content of the game to the Nigerian context and they were done by lunch time!

 

The pitch was articulately delivered by Sunday and Damilola, and the judges had lots of questions and suggestions for the team regarding how to increase the game mechanics. We had to skirt some of the rules of the traditional board game to make it more engaging and realistic for youngsters by adding things like game badges and also color coding the board’s tiles in a logical manner to make it easier to assimilate. Everyone contributed in making it possible for us to be awarded the silver in the competition.

 

The next step is to complete the game and make it available to children so they can start learning about financial literacy. I would like to thank Co-Creation Hub, Junior Achievement Nigeria and Visa for giving us the opportunity to develop this game and by extension contribute to positive change in our environment.

By: Ajibola Aiyedogbon

 

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