SBIR Phase I:Validating and Scaling a Financial and Entrepreneurial Aptitude Assessment

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the development of an intelligent and evolving tool that provides a framework to teach financial literacy skills to children. The literacy lessons are implemented at the child’s pace and stage of development. The product seeks to provide a family finance and entrepreneurism platform that combines real money, peer performance feedback, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven education to teach youth how to responsibly use money and build businesses. By utilizing AI, the project will curate educational content into an immersive digital learning experience that is tailored to the individual regardless of wealth, demographics, or geographic location. Through this innovation, youth may be better positioned for success as they transition to financial independence. This project may also allow academia and industry to work together to validate an individual's financial preparedness and independence.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focusses on designing the principles and mechanics of a user performance feedback mechanism that promotes financial wellness. Financial literacy is important at every stage of life. The Phase I of this project is to develop a performance mechanism and uses deep AI techniques to baseline the goals for data collection and logical data organization, as well as to determine performance measurements and individual learner groupings. These metrics include static data, dynamic data, logical organization of data, calculation methods, and scoring principles. Once optimized, the outcome of the project may encourage individuals to achieve financial stability and success.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.