NIGEL

A gamified, cross-platform financial-literacy platform built in partnership with Beyond Encryption for secondary-school students aged 11–16. Web dashboard + native mobile app, shipped from brief to working product.

I led a four-person team and owned the frontend end-to-end across a Turborepo monorepo — a React 19 + Vite web app (student portal + teacher dashboard) and an Expo React Native mobile app. The work spanned component architecture, the learning and quiz surfaces, the budget simulator, gamification, GDPR-compliant consent flows, the CI/CD pipeline, and a WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility pass.

Beyond Encryption — a Hampshire technology company specialising in secure digital communications — wanted to create social impact through a financial-literacy product for UK secondary schools. Financial education has been on the national curriculum since 2014 but delivery is inconsistent, and the FCA's Financial Lives research found roughly a quarter of UK adults show low financial resilience — habits that form in adolescence. The sponsor, Marketing Director Emily Plummer, briefed us to build Nigel: a gamified app combining structured learning paths with an interactive budget simulator, across web and mobile.

• A student mobile app: island-based learning map, interactive lessons, a quiz engine with streak tracking, achievements and daily challenges, and a four-stage budget simulator (career selection → realistic UK payslip → budget allocation with live feedback → random life events).
• A teacher web dashboard: student analytics, class management, a content builder with quiz scheduling, sortable/filterable rosters, and engagement charts.
• Five learning paths totalling 33 lessons, with sequential unlocking for self-directed students and a teacher override for classroom-led delivery.
• GDPR / ICO Age-Appropriate-Design-compliant flows: parental consent, revocable time-limited family share links, and a dedicated privacy-controls section.

After our second sponsor presentation, Emily raised that not all schools allow mobile-app installation during lessons. That single piece of feedback reshaped the delivery: we built a full web-based student dashboard alongside the mobile app, and made the teacher experience web-first. The takeaway — for school-targeted EdTech, cross-platform web access isn't a nice-to-have, it's the layer that decides whether the product can enter a classroom at all.

• Turborepo monorepo, TypeScript strict mode across both workspaces.
• CI/CD via GitHub Actions: ESLint + Prettier on every push/PR, CodeQL static analysis, and npm audit per workspace — failing on high/critical findings.
• Branch protection requiring green CI + review before merge.
• 338 automated tests (223 mobile, 115 web) green at delivery, plus jest-axe accessibility assertions for WCAG 2.1 AA.

We presented the final product to the client and our tutors. Our team's work was recognised on the day, and Beyond Encryption awarded us an Amazon voucher in recognition of the result. Beyond Encryption also wrote about the visit publicly on LinkedIn.