Case Study: Quinn’s Quandary
A Budgeting Escape Room
Produced by the Life Finance Office at Carnegie Mellon University
Carol Auh, Nick Ryan, Peter Cederberg, Wenqing Yin
Facilitating financial literacy in students at Carnegie Mellon University through novel activities and coaching that teach essential skills while de-stigmatizing the topic of money.
The Design Team
Team Financial Literacy is made up of a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students from the schools of design and business at Carnegie Mellon University. With our combined expertise in design, business, research, and fabrication, we are uniquely qualified to create learning experiences related to financial literacy.
Carol Auh is a first year masters student in the design for interactions program.
Nick Ryan is a final year masters student in business administration.
Peter Cederberg is a final year masters student in the design for interactions program.
Wenqing Yin is a junior undergraduate dual major in product design and HCI.
The Problem
On a high level, student debt in the U.S. is in a state of crisis. As of 2020, the national debt as a result of tuition reached $1.57 trillion. Pennsylvania has been ranked as the state with the second-highest average student debt. Students lack the financial knowledge to navigate this space in a considered manner and have not received sufficient educational or institutional support to rectify this matter. All of this is then further compounded by the taboo nature of discussing finances.
When considered within the context of learning gaps, students lack the knowledge of finances to navigate student debt in a responsible way. In most cases, their knowledge of the topic would fall into the category of unconscious incompetence or conscious incompetence. Students have had little to no opportunity to practice applying this knowledge, resulting skill gaps. Further, the taboo nature of discussing finances and the stereotype that the topic is boring and complicated have contributed to gaps in environment, motivation, and communication.
In terms of stakeholders, parents of students have had a very different experience of higher education, if indeed they attended. While they may wish to support their children, they are often unsure of how to do so within this shifted landscape. Faculty and administration within universities also wish to see their students succeed but disagree as to the level of responsibility they have for a students’ financial wellbeing. While some may have financial expertise, the majority do not and thus fear giving the wrong advice.
Audience & Context
Among the multiple stakeholders that we have looked into, we focused on designing a learning experience for Undergraduate students at Carnegie Mellon University. While some higher education institutions have started to actively support students with educational resources for financial literacy, Carnegie Mellon University has not yet taken any progressive actions. Therefore, we found this a good opportunity to propose a possible solution with novel approaches that are student-centered and student-friendly.
In general, undergraduate students are in a unique position. Being in a transitional period, students move out of their families, start to make bigger purchases, and manage their own finances. They start to have freedom and responsibility in finance while they still lack experience, knowledge, and skills. At the same time, it is a good opportunity space for students to gradually learn and practice their financial literacy with fewer risks. Therefore, we aimed to design a learning experience that gradually scaffolds throughout the four years of college life.
As we focused on CMU students, we set the learning experience within an extension of CMU’s existing financial unit: the HUB. While currently the HUB is dedicated to financial services for the administrative side, we noted that there was nothing that was directly advocating for students. As we elaborate below, we envisioned a learning environment that is easy to access and provides favorable experiences. Students will be introduced to financial education experiences during orientation-week activities, and will be invited to participatory activities at major campus events throughout the semester.
Significance of the Topic
Narrowing down our focus for our project, we selected personal budgeting, debt management, credit building, and investment as our key topics. The four topics were selected as core knowledge and skills that one should have in order to shape a good financial state throughout their life. Without acquiring knowledge and skills around these core topics, one may end up with catastrophic crises such as debt spirals and a lack of stability in the future.
The specific pieces of knowledge that we wanted to address were as follows:
- Budgeting: Structured guidance on how to evaluate current and future spending.
- Debt management: Simple approaches to evaluating debt, including when it is good and bad debt. Planning payments for debt including student loans.
- Credit building: Clear understanding of the factors that affect credit and how to build credit.
- Investment: Critical tips on how to think like an investor.
In addition to the goals regarding knowledge, the goal underlying every topic was to reduce the existing stigma around financial topics. Currently, there is a strong social stigma that finance is not a topic to talk about. It is taboo to openly discuss personal finance. Also, finance is considered to be boring, confusing, and overwhelming. Therefore, we aimed to design fun activities that include social interaction with simple steps and low cognitive loads.
Design Process
Our design process was long, at times winding, but ultimately quite fruitful.
Once we settled on financial literacy as a broad topic, with our audience and context as described above, we began a deep dive into our stakeholders, to really gain an understanding of their perspective and their motivations. Our process involved theorizing, researching, and directly interviewing, which we’ve fully documented across our bevy of medium posts here.
While we initially believed we should incorporate faculty and staff in our learning experience, we discovered an inherent conflict due to disagreements about the appropriateness of their responsibility for providing financial support to students within an academic setting. As such, we turned our attention to the institution of Carnegie Mellon as a whole, and settled on the notion of systemically embedding a student-advocating financial unit: the Life Finance Office.
As mentioned above, Financial literacy is a topic that is often considered taboo, boring, and confusing. To overcome these impediments and successfully deliver financial education to undergraduates, we employed many of the learning theories discussed in our course. A few examples include:
- Stages In the Development of Mastery (Unconscious Incompetence → Conscious Competence). Acknowledging that a critical stage in mastering any skill is to be aware of one’s strengths, weaknesses, and practices surrounding that skill: we framed much of our design process around creating consciousness in our learner.
- Scaffolding (making the incline less steep). The overwhelm and tedium of financial knowledge can be a turnoff, which meant that we needed to create quick wins for our learners, guiding them from a place of confusion to clarity through achievable — even fun — experiences.
- Elements of Mastery (acquiring component skills, practicing them, integrating them). Many lessons in personal finance stack upon each other, which meant that we needed to break the notion of “financial literacy” into smaller, more manageable pieces until we could establish a series of clear, progressive learning experiences that allowed users to discover and assemble financial best practices.
- Cycle of Practice and Feedback (goal-directed practice plus feedback). The theory of cycling practice and feedback brought into sharp focus that we should create learning environments that had clear missions with coaches/guides.
- Learning Flow + Structured Flow of Goals (ladder up and nest goals). Intuitive as concepts but deeply helpful nonetheless, these learning theories helped us understand that we need to ensure that everything we assembled in terms of financial literacy was progressive in nature and timed so that learners could rest and re-engage as they learned — both on a micro and macro level.
As we began to generate financial literacy learning experiences that incorporated these theories, our ideas started to take shape and proliferate. From scavenger hunts to coaching sessions to SIO-integrations to mentorship to apps to group challenges to board games, we found ourselves with a veritable cornucopia of concepts.
While we were excited, we were also challenged by the task of needing to narrow in and to choose wisely. Additionally, we often found ourselves getting overly invested in designing fun experiences that ran the risk of not actually delivering financial learning, so much as they provided a good time for students. At this stage, we knew we needed to take stock and hone our design approach.
Design Approach
Learning framework
We decided to came up with our own framework of learning by combining the 4MAT system, long-and-short term goals, scaffolding and elements of mastery together. We envision each student will be introduced to one core topic of finance annually, and the topics are arranged based on the difficulty. Within each year, they will go through the 4MAT cycle (meaning-concepts-skills-adaptations) by participating in the activities that are provided by the Life Finance Office.
Escape room and its scenario
The Quinn’s Quandary Escape Room is one example of those activities that we designed and prototyped in detail, which covers all four parts of the 4MAT system. The whole escape room is designed under a context where Quinn, an undergraduate student at CMU, has returned from Winter Break and is looking to move out of her apartment to head off to an internship over the summer. However, she needs some help getting her financial situation in order before she moves. She’s invited her friends to help her get everything straightened out.
Experience walkthrough
The whole escape room contains four sub-rooms, each of which represents a unique sub-topic of budgeting. On top of the physical escape room, we also have a phone app that participants may use along the way to complement the experience. For example, the GIF of the app is showing how people would use it while solving the receipt puzzle in the first room.
Room 1:
The first room is about knowing the reality and the proper rules of a spending plan. This room is designed as a messy bedroom where people need to solve a bunch of puzzles related to a spending plan. We will explain the experience of this room in detail in the next section (Prototype section).
Room 2:
After discovering that Quinn, the owner of the first room, is overspending, it is important to learn how to reduce unwanted expenses, which is what room two is all about. In this room, we used a kitchen setting where the participants need to complete a bunch of puzzles related to the theme of cost-cutting. For example, we have a sink puzzle where the participants need to find cancel cards to stop the water from flowing out, which serves as a metaphor of cancelling unwanted subscriptions.
Room 3:
After teaching people about spending in the second room, we want to move on to the topic of saving in the third room, which is another core theme of budgeting. With a garage setting, we aim to teach people how to develop a saving plan for some expensive things such as a car. One example of the puzzles in this room is connecting the circuit by calculating the amount of money they need to save every month in order to purchase a car in 12 months.
Room 4:
Moving on to the last room, we want this room to be a wrap-up where the participants need to do some reflections through solving a puzzle about the knowledge they learned in the previous rooms. We also provide two boards asking them to pin up their short-term and long-term financial goals, which also serves as a reflection activity. We designed this room as a living room setting since the couch will provide an opportunity for people to sit down and chat with each other, which is also part of our initial goals: to help people get more comfortable with talking about finance with others.
Prototype
We created a physical prototype of the first room in the Design graduate studio kitchen area in order to make the experience as real as possible for people to test. Here’s a video demonstrating the prototype in action:
As our participants successfully completed the escape room, we handed our takeaway sheets to better help them retain financial knowledge:
Evaluation Methods
Throughout the project, we were able to conduct a bunch of research and user testing to define our problems and improve our design concepts. Here’s a list of methods we implemented:
- Online survey — to understand our user’s experience with finance (CMU undergrad)
- User interview — to deeply understand people’s motivations and problems; to gather thoughts on our initial ideas
- Speed dating — to test our different ideas and narrow down our focus
- Prototype testing — to improve the user experience
Study Outcomes
After conducting our initial testing we were able to glean a number of findings that we then applied to future edits of our experience. While our learners were certainly engaged with the experience we created and gave positive feedback, we were less sure that they were taking away the learnings that we were attempting to teach them. Some puzzle tasks such as calculating percentiles proved to be too complex given the 15 minutes we had with our participants. And further, we identified a number of places where the experience could be polished. This could be making messages less ambiguous, reinforcing the learnings visually and streamlining the task flow for our facilitators.
Our team was grateful for the opportunity to work together and develop a novel learning experience, deeply informed by the teachings of this course.
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