C-Kitty

Inspiration

Welcome to our project, C-Kitty, your purr-fect companion encouraging you to spread the wealth.

During the pandemic, many small businesses and nonprofit organizations experienced financial shortfalls. Those that had cash reserves, however, were better able to survive the crisis. At the same time, there’s a rising trend in microgiving for reasons like being able to give on their own timeline, with less risk, to more causes, and without pressure. Together, this was the inspiration for creating C-Kitty - to offer a paradigm shift for sharing the wealth in a way where everyone wins.

What it does

Based on the premise that money given now will go further than money given later, we designed C-Kitty to be a chrome extension that anyone can install on the browser to gently remind ourselves to give what we can, when we can, in small amounts, regularly.

How we built it

The extension was built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, P5.js. We also use PayPal’s Payments API and interface with Google Firebase for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

One major hurdle the experienced hackathoner had to overcome was revisiting a project type (i.e. Chrome extension) that she previously failed at, even when working with several others at another hackathon almost a year ago. Other challenges to overcome included working with an international team from United States to India, which made it hard to coordinate times to meet up together to discuss and agree on our idea. At the same time, it made it all the more important to offer clear direction and handoffs to ensure that teammates are not lost with where the team was at when they’re back working on the project. We ran into time constraints trying to implement all the things we had planned. We didn't have time to scrape discounts and alternative sites. We also ran into trouble animating our planned cat with javascript, which ended up taking much longer than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was all of our first times coding a working Chrome Extension! We had to learn a lot about how they worked, and how to create one. Two of our members are also first time hackathon participants, so interacting with and forming teams with people was totally new.

What we learned

More than anything, we learned about design thinking through chatting with mentors and fellow teammates. Code-wise, we used Paypal’s Developer APIs and integrated it with Firebase for the first time! And we successfully created a chrome extension that overrides new tabs (we didn’t realize how easy this was)!!!

What's next for C-Kitty

We plan to build web scrapers to infer information about what charities/organizations the user may be interested in. We also want to implement a cleaner UI, along with better cat animations that reflect happiness and sadness regarding successful/unsuccessful donations. In the future, we may extend the idea further by adding customizable animals other than just cats, and more animations that can appeal to a wider audience.

Built With

• css
• google-firebase
• html
• javascript
• p5.js
• paypal-payment-api