FinEd

Inspiration

To efficiently manage our money, financial literacy is no doubt an important life skill. However, due to its complexity and lack of easy-and-accessible resources, it can be intimidating for a lot of us to get started. As computer students ourselves, where learning is about trial and error, we realized that this is an effective way of learning new concepts and created FinEd to act as a bridge for users to a deeper understanding of finance.

What it does

Our platform provides different visualizations for financial concepts that might be hard to grasp. With interactive forms, site visitors can play around with different scenarios which could help strike a deeper understanding for each topic.

How we built it

Throughout the past day, FinEd has been developed from the ground up starting from brainstorming on the concepts we should include that would provide good coverage that could be encountered. We split up our teams to design visualizations and construct the logic behind them. On the frontend side, the webpage was developed using HTML, CSS, typescript, and React.js for constructing the framework of the website. D3 and plotly allow us to build highly-customizable visualizations that we designed for each of the activities.

Within 24 hours, our web application was developed based on Next.js and React.js frameworks.

Challenges we ran into

Developing a whole interactive website within 24 hours was definitely no easy task. With a team of different programming skillsets, some of us have little to no experience with web development With a team with different skillsets and backgrounds, collaborating codes within the project had been a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are able to successfully established a platform that incorporates various complex financial concepts together in a simple. Individually, they are able to perform and display a complex financial calculation. Allowing users to avoid the hassles of having to switch between various platforms when they want to focus on different financial products.

What we learned

We have practiced and learned modern software engineering tools to build a complex website.

What's next for FinEd

Our plans for the future include a function for users to build their own virtual portfolio which would allow for different assets and financial products to be visualized within the same timeline. As FinEd continues to grow, we plan to partner with brokers which would enable for purchase and selling of real financial products, providing a hands-on experience.