Inspiration
We've all been there. "Let me just take a break" on TikTok turns into hours of wasted time to doomscrolling, just to not remember what you even watched after. It's not productive, educational - it really doesn't help you in any way. In a market where attention=money, it seems like we're giving our money away to big tech companies freely. That's why I decided to build Budget Buddy - a financial literacy app designed to keep you engaged, so you spend your time actually learning something useful instead of continuing to give away your money. If attention=money, we're taking your attention and putting money right back in your pocket. The design to be engaging and educational is a tough balance, but I believe that its been done well in this case.
What it does
Budget Buddy is the app any teen wanting to learn about money would need. It includes basic features, like a balance and goal tracker, and more advanced learning features, like a customized chatbot and "lessons and stories" that take you through interactive lessons and choose your own path stories that teach you about finance whilst also being pretty funny.
How we built it
The tech stack is Flutter, FastAPI, and the Gemini API. I used my MacBook air for most of dev, and had to connect to my actual phone halfway through. I also used Provider in flutter as my state manager, and hosted my backend & database on render.
Challenges we ran into
I ran into numerous challenges - to start off, with my laptop. As it is managed by my school, it flagged my backend as "malicious" using some software, so I couldn't use an emulator anymore. I had to spend about an hour getting my phone setup to test it on that, so was certainly a bit frustrating. I also had quite the big challenge getting the lessons and episodes to work - having ai generate content in a json format isn't the easiest thing, and storing that data was a pretty mentally challenging task, but pushed through. Only wanted to smash my laptop a few times. In a different vain, I couldn't really decide at the beginning what to do, since I wanted to do something more entertainment until the admins sorta made it clear that the theme was more general, so lost some "potential progress" I guess there.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm proud of the story/lesson feature - I think it's pretty unique to my project, especially the stories. The fact that I got it working and that you can make your own just based on topic is pretty cool. The UI is nice too - something I've got a little more experience in, so it was hard not to want to make everything perfect.
What we learned
Learned a lot about hackathons - this is my first one! - and how the process goes. Also learned that perfection isn't gonna happen, getting started is the hardest part for me, and they're a lot more fun than I thought. I also learned technically how to use FastAPI - first project using that. Learned how to better prompt gpt and stuff for better tech answers as well.
What's next for Budget Buddy
I think some obvious polishing stuff is up next - if I had a few more hours, that's certainly what I would do. More broad-scale, I would try to make the whole lessons/stories thing better, instantiating some that are consistent across all profiles. I would also build an onboarding page in order to customize the ai to the user. I think more features could be added, like a simplified news feed or automatic income, stuff like that.
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