Equidex: a Duolingo-like app for Financial Literacy

Before recreational.ai, me and my co-founder were thinking about some of the biggest inefficiencies and problems that a lot to most people have. This project was the fruit of that discussion.

Let’s be honest, most of us were never properly taught about money. It’s no wonder people often say ‘I was never taught about how to pay taxes’. We realised that if learning about finance felt intimidating for adults, it must seem impossible for kids.

This idea sparked Equidex, an experimental iOS app I built to teach the fundamentals of personal finance in a simple, engaging way.

The Problem

Financial literacy is a critical life skill, but it often favours those who have already been surrounded by related conversations and disadvantages people who didn’t grow up in environments where it was more scarcely discussed.

Our goals were as follows:

An app that is

• Approachable: Break down complex topics into simple, bite-sized lessons.
• Engaging: Use gamification to motivate users to keep learning.
• Visual: Have a clean, modern interface that felt encouraging, not overwhelming.

The Solution: A Gamified Learning Experience

I decided to build Equidex as a native iOS app using SwiftUI to create a clean and responsive user interface - it was also one I was familiar with during my time developing Patesian. The core concept was simple: guide the user through a clear learning path, one step at a time.

The app’s main features were designed around this “Duolingo-style” experience:

1. Learning Modules: The curriculum is split into core modules like Money Basics, Saving & Budgeting, Banking, Credit, Taxes, and Investing.
2. Gamified Progress: Users earn coins for completing lessons, track their daily streaks, and take short quizzes to test their knowledge. This provides a sense of accomplishment and encourages consistent learning.
3. Bite-Sized Lessons: Each module contains short, focused lessons that can be completed in just a few minutes, making it easy to fit learning into a busy schedule.
4. Reusable Components: To keep the UI consistent and the code clean, I built a library of reusable views for things like module icons, progress counters, and quiz answer rows.

Designing for Engagement

The biggest challenge wasn’t the code, but the design. How do you make a topic like “Taxes” seem fun?

My solution was to focus on a bright, friendly aesthetic. I used a vibrant gradient for the header and created simple, colourful icons for each module. The home screen presents the entire learning journey visually, so users can see how far they’ve come and what’s next. Quizzes provide immediate feedback with simple “correct” or “incorrect” alerts, turning learning into a low-stakes game.

Final Thoughts

Building Equidex was a fantastic experiment in educational app design. It reinforced how powerful gamification can be in making complex subjects accessible and fun. While it’s just a prototype, it proves that with the right approach, we can make financial literacy something that kids are excited to learn about, not something they dread.

It was a great exercise in SwiftUI and thinking about user motivation. Designing an app that teaches, engages, and encourages is a rewarding challenge.