Eagles Soaring Towards Financial Literacy

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  Our logo

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  Code to initiate actions

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  Code to use Speech Recognizer and Search Bar

Inspiration

When our team brainstormed several topics to choose, we realized that in our society today most adults don’t know about personal finance and the importance of maintaining good credit. We feel that it is very important for teenagers to start learning about these topics as soon as possible because many teenagers start working part-time job, and this is an appropriate time to develop important money managing skills.

What it does

This app was created to teach young people between the ages of 14 to 18 and even adults about personal finance topics such as debit cards, credit, credit scores, and taxes. Our app is unique in the sense that it was created by teenagers so the information is worded so that teenagers can understand. Also, while most apps just tell you that you need a good credit score, our app actually teaches you why. It is presented in a way that is easy for teenagers and adults to learn about managing their finance.

How we built it

We started by brainstorming ideas and drawing a basic storyboard. From there, the team members decided on which roles to take. Each member was responsible for developing a section of the app. We used MIT- App Inventor to code it.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we faced while making this app was distance. Since we are now remote learning because of the COVID19 pandemic, it is more difficult to do group projects like these. We did find a solution to this challenge; we got each other’s phone numbers and communicated this way. In addition, our teacher divided the class into small breakout rooms, so we were able to collaborate during class time. Right from the beginning, we all agreed on our roles and responsibilities towards building this app. Another challenge was combining each member’s screens into one functional app. In order to solve this, we found that by posting our individual work onto the gallery so one person could download the screens and combine them all.

The last challenge we faced was the page with the search bar. After all the pages were made and we began testing our app, we noticed that whenever we tried to search something on this last page, the app would crash. Finding the mistake in the code and correcting it was very challenging. Combining everyone’s work was probably the biggest challenge. We originally did not know what to do for this, so we thought about just rewriting all the code on one group members computer, but we then found out we could post them to the gallery and download them from there.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the way in which we were able to build an app despite the fact that we had to collaborate over zoom with all the challenges that are presented over distance learning. Overcoming those technical and long distance challenges is our biggest accomplishment. Learning what it means to be a team member, to collaborate, to communicate and to integrate the different parts of the app makes us very proud of our final product.

What we learned

While, planning, developing and collaborating to build the app, we gain an understanding of the importance of becoming literate about personal finance. We included in the app those topics that we found to be the foundation to pave the road to success in managing personal finances. In addition we: • Learned how to create an app in MIT app inventor, we used features we hadn’t used before to create this app • We learned how to combine different screens for an app from different computers • Starting to understand computing principles and now we are able to apply them to create a functional app • We developed our problem-solving skills • We have learned to collaborate despite distance learning • We have developed better communication skills

What's next for Eagles Soaring Towards Financial Literacy

In the future we plan to improve user experience by making changes to the code and to expand our app to teach more in depth about personal finance topics and the appropriate time for teenagers to start building their credit history. In addition we want to: • To make the app more accessible and intuitive for users by providing tips on how to use it and incorporating more icons • Over time the app could be expanded to include more specific information and to be maintained so the information is always current. • Update the data to reflect changes as they happen in real time

Built With

• mit-app-inventor