Booth Id:
SOFT023
Category:
Systems Software
Year:
2023
Finalist Names:
Stankiewicz, Samuel (School: West Springfield High School)
Abstract:
A significantly expanding global wealth divide has resulted in a system in which poor families often lack individual financial education and richer families are exposed to these concepts at significantly higher rates. Further, standard financial education in the form of a county, state, or country mandated middle or high school course purported to solve this problem is often ineffective without practical and not merely intellectual experience. My project seeks to provide a practical tool which can be used as a means of exposure to one of the most important of such concepts, the stock market. This occurs without exposing students to financial risk due to the simulated nature of all currency on the platform. Because of the open nature of financial markets in which data is readily available, the creation of this platform is possible by aggregating stock data into a system that calculates value as a traditional broker would, with the exception of simulating all trades and not actually executing them in the real market. The result is Stradr.com, a free platform accessible by any person with an internet connection. The project resulted in success, with users from 48 countries visiting the page over a 28-day period and 1,014 registered accounts created. Roughly 30% of all registered accounts were created in education mode, a setting which hides the names and descriptions of other users, and various schools were observed making up to 43 accounts, a phenomenon observed by counting identical school-based email domains.