Students Create Financial Planning Applications

March 30–While Iowa State offers a variety of workshops and classes to help students get a better grasp on their finances, a new competition may have students going digital to balance their budget.

The first "Money Game Jam" took place at the Hixson-Lied Student Success Center on Saturday, and invited 43 Iowa State students to create a mobile or web application to help other students look at their personal finances.

"It's really about students helping students to create nudges or financial entertainment pieces," said Jonathan Fox, director of financial counseling at Iowa State. "We've really got the classes covered, both online and regular. We do hundreds of workshops. The more traditional education we've got covered, but it's really time to keep trying other things."

Students were asked to create apps over the course of 24 hours, and the winning piece at the end of the competition will go on to be developed and released to Iowa State students potentially in the fall semester, Fox said.

Fox said the judges of the competition were looking for the best creativity, technical feasibility, appeal and financial relevance in the winning app.

For Cami Williams and her team, they hoped to create an app that students could use throughout their four years of classes.

Williams, an Iowa State sophomore in computer science, said her team planned to divide their work between an online and a mobile version of their app throughout the 24 hour competition. Williams said her team's app would be "kind of different," acting as a play-by-play game for a college student.

"The goal of the game is to go all four years without going into debt. If you go into debt, you lose and have to start over," Williams said. "Money management is important for everyone, and hopefully what we're trying to do is show what's a priority and what's not."

Fox said Iowa State has been seeing problems with student debt, as Iowa State has been ranked in top slots for students graduating with the highest debt.

Craig Ogilvie, assistant dean of the graduate college at Iowa State, said recent research has also shown debt concern in graduate students as well.

"We're finding that graduate students are also going into debt while they're at Iowa State," he said. "We don't understand whether undergraduates, that would really strive at graduate school and really should be getting a higher education, are maybe deciding not to because they're worrying about whether they can incur it."

Ogilvie said the new Money Game Jam was a way of starting thinking of new strategies to engage students in thinking about their financial lives. Fox added that while the development process of the winning app is not set in stone, the group hopes to have the app available for release later this fall.

"Our long-run game and our hope is that this is something students will be playing during fall semester," he said. "We know that's a big thing, and it's going to depend on the complexity of the game that ends up winning. But that's our goal. It's what's so fun about the project."

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