Inspiration
As university students, we understand the delicate balance between spending on campus necessities and maintaining a budget. In our day-to-day lives, we encounter a common issue among our peers and ourselves: a lack of financial literacy. This gap in knowledge often leads to missed opportunities, as there are numerous resources available at the university that students are simply not aware of. Inspired by these challenges, we decided to create a solution - a web platform that conveniently brings all these resources to students’ fingertips. FinancialBuddy not only provides easy access to these resources but also offers interactive learning opportunities to enhance students’ financial literacy. The unique feature of our platform is the reward system, where points earned through learning can be redeemed at various food places around campus, making financial education not just beneficial but also enjoyable. Our hope is that this platform will empower students to make informed financial decisions and lead a more balanced university life.
What it does
FinancialBuddy provides a wealth of resources to enhance financial literacy skills of university students. Several small tips, tricks, and fun facts are present throughout the web page to make the learning process more engaging. Resources such as scholarship applications (from sources both within and outside of UofC), budget planning, and a form to connect with a UofC financial advisor are presented to make it convenient for students to access university resources from one central platform. This enables students to better use the resources offered by their educational institutions.
The web platform also uses a unique points system, where students can earn redeemable points for every activity completed and resource used, adding an element of reward and motivation. These points can be redeemed through discounts and coupons at several restaurants and small businesses throughout campus.
How we built it
This website uses an HTML and CSS frontend with a JavaScript backend.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into challenges while attempting to utilize JavaScript to enhance the security of our website. For our sign-up page, we were looking to implement error checking to ensure that users input all details required to create an account with FinancialBuddy. Implementing this resulted in several features of our website losing their functionality. We tried our best to solve the error but found issues within. We decided then to remove the required sign-up as we wanted to demonstrate a working product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a team entering this hackathon with beginner-level experience in web dev, we are proud that we were able to create a functioning webpage from scratch, from inception to completion, in under 24 hours. Taking inspiration from a daily need, we transformed our passion for enhancing the lives of university students into a working solution prototype!
What we learned
As a team entering this hackathon with begineer-level experience in web dev, not only did we learn about creating intuitive user interfaces, but also how backend technologies can be implemented to add interactivity to a web page and enhance its overall appeal. Through our trials and errors we got a first-hand feel for the workings of the design process.
What's next for FinancialBuddy
In future developments of FinancialBuddy we plan to implement error handling and many other features such as more educational opportunities for students to learn about finances.
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