Specification for the Final Project

Manifesto:

My project is going to be an amplified version of the interest application, based on a story of a piggy bank getting a loan and starting a savings account. I think my application will help people learn the value of saving money and the power of a seemingly insignificant 5% interest on a loan. The original application was just a calculator with a simple graphic of money s[inning around a wheel. I plan to add a graphic of a piggy bank walking towards the bank on the calculator page. When you hit the calculate button on the savings account page I would like a small animation of a piggy bank getting a savings account, making deposits and having money in the bank to play. When you hit the calculate button on the loan page I want an animation of a piggy bank getting a loan buying a boat, then having to make payments on the loan to play. The actual calculator and basic programming of my application will be the same as the original application.

Art:

The art and graphics portion of my project is mainly an animation of a piggy bank going to a bank and getting a loan and savings account. I am making the piggy bank graphics on Photoshop by taking a picture of a piggy bank off the internet and tracing over and adding a watercolor filter to it. The effect is rather cartoony, rather than using an actual picture. I will be animating my graphics on flash by using armatures and motion tweens in nested animations. The upside of the nested animations is that the timeline won’t be as cluttered and therefore won’t interfere with the code. I have a feeling that the actual animating of the piggy bank will be the hardest part of the project, as I want to draw the piggy bank walking, dancing and receiving/giving money. It will be majorly time-consuming, but I think the end result will be really great.

Applied Math:

My math uses the math of interest with both savings accounts and loans. Interest is the fee that either the bank pays you to keep your money there or the fee that you pay the bank to get a loan. With a savings account you put a set amount of money into a bank account at an interval, such as every month. The equation for calculating how much money you will have in your savings account after a set amount of time is: A=PMT*((1+APR/n)^(n*y)-1/ (APR/n) ), where PMT is the amount of money you deposit at each interval, APR is the interest rate (in decimals), n is the number of deposits you make per year, and y is the number of years your savings account is for. So when you plug all of those variables into the equation you can find A, the total amount of money that you will have in your savings account after n years. For a loan the equation is different because you’re calculating how much you pay per month, and you already know how much you took out. PMT= (P(APR/n)/1-(1+APR/n)^(-n*y)), where PMT is your monthly payment, APR is the interest rate, n is the number of payments you make per year, and y is the number of years you want to pay off your loan in. Both equations are simple enough once you know them and the application will allow you to plug in the variables and it will calculate the answers for you.

Programming:

The programming for my application includes the original work and some additions that I wil be adding in. The original coding for the math portion, in which the application calculates interest will be kept the same. I’ll add some gotoandplay functions so I can have a title page with buttons for each calculator and the calculate buttons will cue the animation to play. I’m not exactly sure how to do this as of this point, but I think it sounds possible. The original programming that makes the calculator work is var A:Number= PMT*((Math.pow(1+APR/n,n*Y)-1)/(APR/n)); This is programming language for PMT times the 1+APR/n to (n*y) -1, all of that over APR/n. So the original equation for a savings account is then understood by the application so that it can do the math for you.