Spondooli February Update

Hello!

Hello and welcome to the first of our monthly update blogs for Spondooli. What are we doing? What are our plans for the future? What's the next Spondooli update going to be about? All these questions and many more will be answered in these posts.

A quick thank you

Over the past two and a half years, Spondooli has grown to a state we could have only dreamed of when we started. Spondooli has been downloaded over 1.6 thousand times and used in over a dozen classrooms. None of this could have been possible without you. Therefore, we have been working overtime to make sure Spondooli gives you the best financial educational experience possible, without any issues to you or your students. This is not a small task, so here's how we will tackle it.

Plans for the future of Spondooli

First, we have spent many long days perfecting what makes Spondooli great. We went back through the user interface and streamlined the design all to make the user experience feel more polished, with new, refined font choices to match. We are also looking to add new features to the game, including private teams, friends lists, and even options trading. Spondooli has been growing faster than we could ever imagine, so it is our duty and honor to improve the game to keep up with this growth.

Plans beyond Spondooli

As we’ve gained experience as developers and our team has grown, we continue looking to what should be our next steps in developing the Spondooli brand. We are planning to release two major new products in the coming year (or so), Spondooli Boom N’ Bust and SponDeluxe. Spondooli Boom N’ Bust is a competitive stock market game where students play through a select period of stock market history in just a few minutes, using power ups and investment strategies to overcome their peers. On the other hand, SponDeluxe is an expansive story-driven experience, targeted at individual gamers rather than schools, where the player takes the role of a novice stock trader in the year 1900. The game travels rapidly, taking the player all the way until the year 2000. As the game progresses, not only does the player’s skills improve, but a larger story is revealed through newspapers, letters, and conversations with in-game characters. While we plan to release SponDeluxe in over a year, Spondooli Boom N’ Bust should be ready by the end of March for all schools and classes currently using Spondooli.

Spondooli Boom N’ Bust

In Spondooli Boom N’ Bust, the teacher chooses a period of recent stock market history to play, say 1985 - 2005, and a length of the round, say 10 minutes, then a game is hosted. After the students join, all the stock names are replaced with fictitious names and they each have to use just the stock information and their knowledge of historical events to outwit their opponents. Additionally, students can invest their earnings into power-ups from the shop that can either help themselves or handicap their opponent(s) in disastrous ways. With power-ups, a student can do everything from temporarily freezing an account of their choosing to causing the entire economy to go into recession for all students. After testing an alpha build, we believe that Spondooli Boom N’ Bust would be the perfect companion teaching tool for vanilla Spondooli. Say, for the last 10 minutes of class, a teacher could host a game that can give the students inspiration to further learn to invest in the stock market. Hosting a Boom N’ Bust game would never interfere with an already set up class. Spondooli Boom N’ Bust also provides a key competitive advantage to all stock market simulators, which is the fact that it can teach long-term investment. The game goes multiple days per second, so students can see the tangible benefits of investing over many years. Importantly, Spondooli Boom N’ Bust would also provide a great historical teaching experience. As the students go through periods such as the 1987 and 2008 recessions, the dot com boom and subsequent bust, and more, they can get a front-row seat to history’s most intense economic episodes.

How we will make this happen

We are a small team of high school students, with limited time and capital. While the former is up to us to get a hold of, the latter is where we need your help. This starts with our most major fundraising strategy to date, Spondooli merchandise. From phone cases to t-shirts, we are working our best to make this merch the best it can be. When it releases, later this month, we hope you will help support our endeavors by buying our merch. With this capital, we will be able to make Spondooli Boom N’ Bust and SponDeluxe as good as they can be.

In conclusion

In conclusion, Spondooli has grown dramatically over the past two years, therefore we are constantly working to not only better the current product, but also expand into new frontiers of education and game development. 

We will do our best to release these updates monthly, so stick around for the next one.