cash up

Inspiration

Our team consisted of 4 high school sophomores who knew close to nothing about money. How would we ever afford college tuition? Should we spend all of our money right when we get it? Clearly, financial literacy in younger generations wasn’t exactly a subject we were taught at school. We wanted to create a product that younger audiences like us– high school and college students may use to responsibly spend their money. How can we make an appealing product that younger people use? A social aspect! From that idea, we built on features that lock users in while still achieving our goal of educating financially.

What it does

CashUp helps high school and college students learn to be financially literate, while giving it a social aspect to make it more appealing for its younger audience. It does this in many ways including providing educational videos which in return help fund the individual. The user may also deposit money in different savings for different purposes (for example: college tuition, vacation, etc.). Users can add other users to their friends list in which they can begin to creatively share different achievements and deposits – this creates a gamification of the topic which extends user retention.

How we built it

We began our primary planning phase in Figma, where we made a concept UI while experimenting with different colors and elements. Once our UI was decided on, we moved to Repl.it where we constructed the actual code collaboratively. We used basic languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to develop our final product.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was time management, as this is one of our very first in person hackathons. At first it was difficult getting everything in order -- we coded into the night and didn't organize which features needed to be worked on. Communication was also slightly difficult in terms of understanding which tasks were unfinished and how to do them. Additionally, we had to make many compromises to our UI due to complexity and languages required. However in the end, we were able to navigate through these issues and collaboratively construct our final project!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UI we created was an accomplishment we were proud of because we felt that it was simple enough for people to be able to understand it easily while still looking neat and professional. Another accomplishment we were proud of was how well the program functioned, as there were few bugs for it being our first time attempting to create a website like this. Our final accomplishment was being able to finish the project in time, as we were nervous that coding this project would take too long.

What we learned

The lesson we learned was that communication is extremely important in the success of creating a working product. We learned that if we do not communicate what we are doing to other team members it may lead to misunderstanding and delay as some of us may not be informed of what to do. Additionally, we definitely grew our knowledge on coding this weekend. We practiced languages using terms we were unfamiliar with learned lots of features that we previously did not know

What's next for CashUp

We hope to make it a usable app as well since it is already a website. We want it to have a database that keeps the users information. We also hope to expand our social connections feature to be more broad and inclusive, adding a more social media feel to this project. Furthermore we would like to be able to code the rest of the features of the site to function as intended to, since as of right now they are mostly only concepts of what the features would do.