A magical stack of finance hacks. Build healthy financial habits & more.
This year, a study by George Washington University concluded that, across the 5 most recent generations, financial literacy is lowest among Generation Z. Within that same study, 39% of participants felt a need to improve their personal finance knowledge, with a majority of those respondents belonging to Gen Z. This inspired me to develop Unicorn Stack, a platform devoted to serving those needs through interactive and gamified features that strengthen one’s financial literacy.
Unicorn Stack is a fun, easy-to-use platform that navigates Gen Z users through a series of interactive experiences to help build healthy financial habits. Each tab of the website strengthens one’s financial literacy in a specific area, whether it be investing, budgeting, or earning. Unicorn Stack also harnesses the power of Augmented Reality (AR) and 3D games to provide an engaging, immersive experience for users seeking to enhance their personal finance knowledge. Below is a quick snippet of each feature in Unicorn Stack:
💰 Budget Tracker: Your handy-dandy budget tracker buddy. Whether you're on a last-minute grocery store run or tracking your bills for the month, you’re all covered!
📊 Stock Charts: Explore a collection of live stock charts, trends, and data from well-known tech companies, cryptocurrency, and the US Stock Market.
👾 Finance Lessons, 3D Edition: Learn about important investing terms through an interactive 3D visualizer experience, one flashcard at a time!
🌐 Global Currency Quiz, AR Edition: Test your knowledge of global currency through the power of AR. At each question, use your phone to scan the QR code and bring up an AR-generated model of the corresponding coin.
💸 Resources for Side Hustles: A curated collection of resources to diversify your income and monetize your passions.
UX Design & Branding: I first created high-fidelity wireframes with Figma to map out an intuitive experience for users, then implemented the product’s branding, gradients, and other assets (also with Figma) to solidify the visual identity of Unicorn Stack.
Web Development: I used HTML, CSS, & JavaScript to develop the website on Glitch, the Bootstrap framework for responsiveness, and the Google Fonts API to import the “Inter” font to align with Unicorn Stack’s branding. I also implemented Real-Time Stock Market Chart Widgets from TradingView through embedded HTML code in the “Stocks” tab.
AR Visualization & Game Development: To render currency through AR-generated models for the “Currency” tab, I downloaded glTF files from Sketchfab and uploaded them to the cloud using Echo3D. For the “Facts” tab, I used CoSpaces to create an interactive 3D game with its built-in programming language, CoBlocks.
This was my first time diving into AR & game development, so it was fun to explore different software such as Echo3D, CoSpaces, and CoBlocks to bring Unicorn Stack’s features to life. I learned how to render 3D models into AR models into the cloud through Echo3D, along with how to create interactive 3D learning games with the CoBlocks programming language in CoSpaces.
Virtual Reality (VR): In the future, I plan to implement VR-based learning to cover in-depth, interactive lessons in areas such as budgeting, side hustles, and corporate finance. This will be created using the Unity game engine and Blender for 3D modelling.
Augmented Reality (AR): I will diversify the “Global Currency Quiz” with more questions and AR-generated models of different forms of currency across the world.
Community Forum: I will also develop a community forum for Gen Z to connect as they navigate through their journey in personal finance and financial literacy.