Financial Literacy is a course that many high schools across the country offer to help students with their future financially. According to finEDge, 50 percent of high school seniors wish they learned about personal finance in high school. 

To solve this problem, a group of Frisco Independent School District (FISD) students created a website called monetact to help students learn about finance. 

Anmol Hiremath, one of the students and senior at Lebanon Trail High School (LTHS), details the components of the website. 

“We have a simple interface with multiple features,” he said. “These features range from a list of basic financial topics to a budgeting tool to a stock market simulator.”

Nishanth Karlapudi, a member of the group and senior at Independence High School (IHS), recounts how they came up with the idea of building the website. 

“We came up with the idea last December,” he said. “We were looking for common problems adolescents were currently facing and then came up with this idea after a month of research.”

Although the team built the website relatively quickly, it took much longer to finalize the product before it was launched on Oct. 16, 2021.

“It took us about a week to create the website,” Karlapudi said. “But after receiving feedback and reviewing the website, it took about 8 months to create our final product.”

Hiremath recalls the different things they learned from creating the website. 

“While making the website, we learned how to formally organize information in an effective manner and work among a team with different opinions,” he said. “We were able to divide our work into separate sub groups with an individual sub team lead.”

Karlapudi relates how they were also able to teach finance to middle school students as well as how the team was able to efficiently organize their work to be able to get it done on time. 

“We selected and hired younger middle school interns to help us with managing the website as they gain valuable experience in website making and personal finance,” he said. “We have over 600 slides of our work throughout the year and held weekly meetings in order to address our previous work and next step.”

Karlapudi talks about how even though they did face certain challenges and negative feedback, the entire process was a pleasant experience for them. 

“It was definitely an enjoyable process in our opinion,” he said. “Although sometimes it was hard hearing the negative feedback from our friends, it was a significant learning process for us.”

Hiremath talked about the important different qualities needed to exhibit to efficiently achieve their goal. 

“We need to be diligent and persistent,” he said. “One wasted week can lead to a wasted month and later a wasted team.”