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Budget Buddy Concepts
Inspiration
The popular handheld Tamagotchi was the major inspiration for our project.
Tamagotchi is an addictive game that incentivizes a player's constant care of a virtual pet so that their little fellow can grow up happy and healthy. Our team wanted to incorporate that idea into real life and allow users to focus that care and attention to the most important parts of their own lives. Your personal finances and how well you manage them create invisible implications that can affect not only your quality of life, but also those of your loved ones.
By helping you stay accountable for your purchases, your very own Budget Buddy is able to prosper and thrive along side your savings.
What it does
Budget Buddy not only serves as a companion but also as a form of interactive, educational learning of your personal finances. Budget Buddy loves playing mini games that allows the user to build financial literacy skills. Budget Buddy also responds in real time to decisions such as unsubscribing from rarely used streaming services, which in turn rewards your buddy with food.
Your Budget Buddy will evolve based on how well and consistent you have been with your spending habits. On the contrary, with constant neglect, a Budget Buddy may not look so hot.
However, you can revert those consequences at any point. By integrating Budget Buddy into your daily life, your companion will promote the growth of your financial literacy and your budgeting skills!
How we built it
As a group we wanted to build something that would not only be beneficial but also interactive and entertaining for the general public. Through meticulous brainstorming, harnessing of each individuals' strengths, and with the power of vibing Budget Buddy came to life.
Challenges we ran into
One major challenge included version control. The team has never worked in a coding collaborative setting before so the first hurdle of wrangling with Github was inevitable. The process was painful to say the least. We ended up hot potato-ing the project across many repositories, never establishing a proper version control system workflow. For the majority of the team, this was also their first hackathon so the whole event was a learning process. But through teamwork we still got it done!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud present the interactive user interface we were able to create during the hackathon. Many of us have never built a whole concept from the ground up so witnessing Budget Buddy react in real time to user actions was incredibly satisfying. It breathes a lot of life into our virtual friend.
Drawing inspiration of early concept work ultimately brought a lot of spirit and direction to the project as a whole.
What we learned
We learned how to effectively throw "things" at the wall and quickly prototype an idea, no matter how messy the process. We also learned how to use new programs during the duration of the hackathon which was intimidating at first, but quickly became critical to the completion of our idea.
What's next for BudgetBuddy
- Ability to grow and customize a variety of Budget Buddies.
- Ability to cancel subscriptions on the fly.
- Fully fledged mobile support.
- Daily check in incentives to support bank account monitoring.
- Partnerships with financial institutions providing financial literacy education.
- Fully private and seamless integration with users financial information. Encrypted information that never enters the cloud.
- Further integration of one's Budget Buddy into the mini games to give the user a more immersed experience.
- Continuing Budget Buddy's training to give it a friendlier demeanor while also updating the financial skills it can provide to its user.
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