FinancEZ

Inspiration:

Growing up, we noticed the lack of financial emphasis in the elementary school curriculum, inspiring us to use technology to solve this issue. After noticing a strong correlation between an adult's saving and spending methods and what they were taught as kids, we created an app that would help teach and track how to effectively save and goal set. With alarming statistics about American adults’ financials such as "44% of Americans don’t have enough cash to cover a $400 emergency," we knew this needed to change.

What it does:

FinancEZ serves to provide a stepping stone into money management and financial literacy from an elementary age. The app allows a parent to set up a weekly initial amount of money into an account that the student can deposit and withdraw from. However, being able to deposit and withdraw money from an account only serves as a tracker/organizer for the student’s finances and does not teach the importance of saving, a concept key for future financial freedom. Therefore, we added a goals page so that students can set weekly goals and be informed about whether they reached their saving goals for that week or not.

How we built it:

The user interface was built through Figma and the screens were put together through Marvel. The back-end programming was done through Python.

Challenges we ran into:

While trying to build our prototype for our app FinancEZ, we ran into some problems when trying to use Figma and Marvel for the design aspect. We were unable to figure out how to use the various features of this interface to design our app, such as importing images and adding text files to enhance our prototype. Through attending the Figma workshop and intensive research, we were able to learn how to use these features and implement it into our app prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

Being first-time participants in a hackathon, we didn’t know what to expect. Through attending the workshops and learning about various topics through the guest speakers, as well as having the opportunity to work on a self-developed project was an unforgettable learning experience. In the last 24 hours, we were able to build a prototype for an app using Figma and Marvel as well as utilize Python to program our code. As a team, we are very proud of what we have accomplished in our short amount of time and hope to be able to learn more through participating in future hackathons!

What we learned:

We learned about a plethora of prototype tools and how to utilize them to create a user-friendly interface. We learned how to implement new python techniques that help provide a greater level of efficiency to our code and project as a whole.

What's next for FinancEZ:

We hope to further work on the app to make it so that it can actually be released on platforms for public use. Before that, however, there’s a lot of prototyping, backend coding, and market research that needs to be implemented in order to optimize the release of FinancEZ. Hopefully, when the app does get released we can work with schools in the area to encourage the use so that children can get exposed to the principles of financial literacy as soon as possible.

Built With

• figma
• marvel
• python