Inspiration: We were inspired by the vast lack of awareness concerning financial literacy among millenials. We decided it was prudent we built an app addressing this issue.
Hackathon - https://devpost.com/software/adulting-up1tr0
In order to educate our target demographic (millennials) we thought the best way to reach out was through a social media feed curated for each individual user through a questionnaire inquiring about areas of financial literacy that they would be unfamiliar with (i.e. credit, 401k, student loans). And then feed media content in the form of articles, videos, budgeting schedules and more to that user pertaining to the areas they were interested in knowing more about.
To build the web application we used HTML, CSS, JavaScript. We also used json to make a database to host all of the content. We used Visual Studio Code as our text editor and GitHub for our repository. We also made sure to utilize google forms and google doc to collaborate together as a team.
We had a difficult time implementing a realtime database with firebase, and making an app that would be available cross platform in order to reach a wider base of our target audience.
It took laborious hours to agree upon an idea/project that incorporated all our varying passions, interests and abilities. We feel accomplished having come together to brainstorm collectively and to create an impactful application that addressed a real issue amongst our generation.
For most of us it was our first hackathon so there was a steep learning curve when it came to planning the infrastructure and features of the app. The workshops were a tremendous help in narrowing down what features we could have implemented in the app. For instance, we initially wanted to incorporate NLP in our app to help curate the feed for each individual user, however we found it more efficient to simplify the structure of the app using just HTML, JavaScript and CSS and use a json file for our database.
We see #adulting having more content (feed) for each user with more automated personalization. We want to create a partnership with global banking corporations to have every user link their banking account/debit card to the site and app. We hope to incorporate a budget preset, an automatic billing payment schedule to take the stress out of managing your bills. We also plan on creating incredibly simple videos that simplify difficult financial concepts and financial forms. Finally, we would like to add more functionality to the site using Firebase.