Bob's Stocks Diner

Inspiration

As a team of four recently graduated high school students, we had come to a realization that the school system fails to properly educate its students on the stock market and its trends. After doing some research, we had found that there were not many resources available online that were easy to understand and appealing to the target audience of our choice一students in grades 1-8. This then led us to the idea of creating our platform in the format of a game to ensure engagement and enjoyment for the students, creating a bigger impact in their learning. As some of our teammates reside in families who run restaurants, we had become inspired to incorporate some of our personal experiences into our game to make it not only unique, but meaningful to us as well.

What it does

Bob’s Stocks Diner is a stock market simulator in the form of a restaurant-themed game. Our aim is to help students in grades 1-8 learn about the stock market and improve their financial literacy through practical experience. Our stock market, or the menu items at Bob’s Stocks Diner, match real-life circumstances in the sense that they are highly dependent on outside factors. For example, we incorporated date, weather, and local news that play a huge role in the price of the menu items, simulating the fluctuation of the stock market in the real world.

How we built it

First, we planned and designed the application using Figma, a web-based graphics editing and user interface design app. Then, we built Bob’s Stocks Diner in Python along with its well-known framework Tkinter. We also used Rasa X to build an AI Assistant / chatbot called Bob.

Challenges we ran into

The installation process of Rasa X took a very long time, and without the help of our mentor, we would not have been able to install the Bot in the first place. Due to issues with the tool’s package, the bot was unable to connect to the Local Host web server, however, we successfully completed training the bot to work on terminal.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As incoming students at the University of Waterloo with little to no experience in hackathons, every tool we’ve used for this project was new to us. However, we’re proud that we were able to successfully design and develop our application using new technologies such as Figma, Tkinter, and Rasa X. We’re most proud of our chatbot which is able to return a very basic set of player queries including word definitions, game rules, tips, and resources.

What we learned

Through this hackathon, we improved our Python skills and became familiar with the famous Tkinter framework, chatbot development, and app prototyping. In the future, we hope to apply our newfound skills to solve problems in fintech!

What's next for Bob's Stocks Diner

Our next steps for the app would be to connect the main gaming page to the backend which would be responsible for storing, organizing, and processing data. Also, we plan to make the chatbot more powerful by allowing it to provide real-time stock updates using Yahoo Finance API.

Built With

• figma
• python
• rasax
• tkinter