PiggyBank

The app that helps individuals learn about financial literacy.

Comment

Inspiration

We were inspired to create an app that helps people learn about financial literacy because so many people do not know how to budget, save, and invest. Too many people think that investing is too complicated and is something only for the wealthy. Our discussion started out with stories about how many young folks gravitate towards convenience foods and don't consider the cost per serving of their meals. If left unchecked, these habits can set them up for lack of savings and struggles with retirement savings later in life.

We were also inspired by the services offered by Wealthsimple, and sought to pass along learning about low cost products that are useful for everyone.

What it does

PiggyBank is a tool for teaching people about financial literacy in a way that makes it fun and engaging. We aim to teach basic financial knowledge, and draw people in by creating a fun incentive to keep learning.

  • The app offers a series of learning modules based on different financial topics.
  • As they complete modules, they get coins for answering correctly.
  • As they gain more coins, they can level up and unlock more learning modules.

In this way, PiggyBank will inspire more people to budget, save, and invest in their financial futures.

How we built it

  • The UI/UX was designed with Figma.
  • The front-end application was written in JavaScript using React.
  • The back-end server was built using Node.js, Express.js, and PostgreSQL. The back-end is responsible for user authentication, user creation, and serving the questions for the learning modules.

Challenges we ran into

  • Unfortunately, our fourth team member had to leave due to illness right before we started. This forced us to scale back the features we could deliver and made it harder to build out the app.
  • Edward is new to Node development, which increased the difficulty when we lost our other backend developer.
  • Deploying with PostgreSQL on Heroku also proved to be challenging and we had to spend quite a bit of time working through config issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we finished a working prototype using new technology/tools, and learned a lot about design and JavaScript development. We managed to come up with a product idea we are inspired to continue working on, and worked great as a team to get it done. In spite of the challenges, we had a lot of fun, made new friends, and became better developers/designer along the way!

What we learned

  • We learned that life happens, and you have to make the best of challenging situations.
  • Communication is key to working together!
  • We learned about financial literacy, investing, and great tools to get started at Wealthsimple.

What's next for PiggyBank

We plan to continue working through our project backlog, focusing on user feedback elements to make it more fun. We also hope to improve the database APIs and improve responsiveness of the UI. Down the line we hope to test it out with friends and family to see if it has potential for continued development!

Share this project:

Updates