About Investcense

What I built

• A six-topic, 53-lesson curriculum (budgeting, saving, investing basics, investment vehicles, credit and debt, taxes) written from scratch in plain English.
• A bite-sized lesson player with stage-by-stage paging, video-style walkthroughs generated from each lesson, and a hands-on interactive widget built for every lesson.
• Three interactive games: Build a Portfolio (asset allocation against a game benchmark), Match the Goal to the Investment, and The Fund (an idle game about ownership, reinvestment, and compounding).
• A personalized path: a short survey that recommends lessons only, never investments.
• Progress and confidence tracking with a concept-level learning engine, plus optional Google sign-in with cloud saves and public leaderboards.

How it's built

Next.js (App Router), React, and TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS, with Motion for animation, Recharts for charts, Zustand for game state, and Supabase for accounts, cloud saves, and leaderboards. Deployed on Vercel. All lesson content, interactive widgets, and game logic were designed and built specifically for this site.

Designed and built over the summer of 2026, with ongoing updates.

Why I built it

Most financial education is either jargon-heavy or a wall of text. I wanted a place where a true beginner can learn by reading a little, seeing the idea illustrated, trying it hands-on, and playing with it in a game, without being sold anything along the way.

Case study: educational, never advisory

The hardest design problem here wasn’t technical. Writing about money in plain English pulls constantly toward telling people what to do, and an education site must not do that. These are some of the calls where the line mattered — each one is how the site actually behaves, not aspiration.

• “The benchmark,” not “the market.” The portfolio game compares your mix against an even 25% split of its four options. Early copy called that “beating the market” — but a fixed even mix isn't the market, and implying market-beating skill is exactly the claim an educational site shouldn't make. Every screen now calls it the game benchmark and explains how it's built.
• Lessons are recommended. Investments never are. The personalization survey scores answers into educational topics only, and says so at every entry point. Its guardrails are shaped like a suitability conversation: someone unsure about risk is routed to the risk-and-return lesson first, and someone who says their everyday money needs attention sees budgeting and an emergency fund before any investing topic.
• If it isn't taught here, it isn't linked here. The survey once offered an “Options” topic. There is no options lesson, so rather than a recommendation card that leads nowhere honest, the topic was removed until the lesson exists.
• Simulated is labeled simulated. Market League tracks real market data and labels it delayed; if live data is ever unavailable, a simulated-data banner says so. The games hub leads with “no real money on the line,” and no screen presents a game result as evidence of real-world investing skill — the hall of fame even notes that short contests reward bold swings.
• Numbers that can't quietly go wrong. Tax lessons use clearly labeled fictional brackets, so the mechanism is the lesson and nothing goes stale. Credit widgets compute real amortization instead of quoting canned figures. Rule-based topics — accounts, credit, taxes — cite primary sources: Investor.gov, FINRA, the IRS, the CFPB.
• Privacy claims are edited like copy, against the facts. The privacy page states exactly what is and isn't stored — survey answers are never saved, only the derived topic suggestions — and when cookieless page counting was added, the “we don't run analytics” line was rewritten to disclose it plainly.
• Disclosure without wallpaper. One quiet line — educational purposes only, investing involves risk, no advice — travels the entire site, including inside the games' own full-bleed screens. Placed where it's read, not stacked until it's ignored.

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