Project: NCCP’s Family Resource Simulator

Try the Simulator: nccp.org

The National Center for Children in Poverty aims to provide accurate information about how state and national policies affect the real lives of low-income families and children. One of the tools they have developed to do this is the Family Resource Simulator, which provides an actual model of what expenses and benefits families in dozens of states have at different levels of income.

Since 2003, I have been the lead programmer on this project, writing state-specific code (in Perl and PHP) based on NCCP researchers’ findings about state and federal laws. In addition to programming the backend modeling software, I have created a web-based front-end to the tool that offers users a variety of choices regarding family options and outputs modeling data as both tables and charts that are created on-the-fly. To ease in the development of Simulators for additional states, I’ve also developed a separate testing interface that allows staff to take a closer look at how the tool’s outputs are being generated.