Projects

The Pencil Game is an interactive digital tool for studying competitive behavior in a controlled experimental setting. Developed with Prof. Alessandra Cassar (USFCA), it features two apps: a user app for gameplay and an admin app for managing experiments.

Players compete in timed rounds to control a virtual pen, using it to copy an 8-digit number while opponents can "steal" the pen to take their turn. The admin app allows researchers to configure settings, onboard participants via QR codes, and track gameplay in real time. A synchronized database ensures fairness and precise data collection.

Designed for academic research and teaching, the Pencil Game combines simplicity with technological precision to provide unique insights into competition and decision-making.

In collaboration with researchers from Stanford and Princeton, we developed a mobile simulation game to help tomato farmers in Uganda improve crop yields through mechanistic learning. Players experiment with nutrient levels - Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and Potassium (K) - to understand their impact on plant growth. Farmers can select fertilizers from a dropdown menu or input desired NPK values, with an optimization algorithm suggesting efficient combinations.

Designed for offline use in field settings, the game includes a practice mode and an admin interface for managing data uploads. Field-tested with farmers in Uganda in November 2024, the game equips users with practical nutrient management skills to enhance their fertilizer decisions.

We collaborated with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to create a mobile agricultural simulation game as part of the "Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa" (AICCRA) program, funded by the World Bank. This game served as a tool to better understand how both male and female farmers might incorporate Climate Information Services (CIS) into their agricultural decision-making processes.

To ensure the success of the field experiment that was conducted in Zambia, we developed a simple and user-friendly application that can be played offline by individual players and couples. The game also included a practice mode for participants to get familiar with the game before starting the actual simulation and an admin page for enumerators to upload the data collected to the database once an internet connection is reestablished. 

The findings indicate that farmers actively use weather forecasts and to a lesser extent, investment advice to improve their welfare, and that providing forecasts may help spouses reach agreement on agricultural investment decisions. You can read more about the study in the IFRPI working paper here.

We developed a digital simulation game together with fellow Development Economics students and under the supervision of Prof. Bruce Wydick at the University of San Francisco that was used to conduct randomized controlled trials aimed at teaching financial literacy to microcredit borrowers in low-income countries. The game was localized into Luganda and Kannada to ensure that there is no language barrier for the participants of the experiment, additionally the use of text throughout the game was minimized to account for low literacy rates.

The game was designed with a progressive difficulty curve, starting with simple concepts and gradually increasing in complexity based on the scenarios presented to the participants. This allows users to build their knowledge and skills gradually, making it easier to understand and apply the more advanced financial concepts. Each decision a user made in the game was collected, which allows for a detailed analysis of user behavior within the game as well as comparing their game performance over time. 

The game was subsequently played by study participants in Uganda and India during the field experiment conducted in the summer of 2023 and is used in a subsequent RCT in Peru in the summer of 2024.