GLAM | Devpost

Girls Learning About Money

Inspiration

At GLAM, we aim to empower women through our interactive financial literacy platform that is designed to educate, inspire, and equip women with the necessary financial knowledge to make informed decisions. We believe that financial literacy is crucial because many young women lack the essential knowledge needed to make informed decisions about their own finances. Without strong financial literacy, it can easily lead to poor financial security and instability. GLAM aims to fill this gap by providing women with the tools, resources, and confidence to navigate their financial futures.

What it does

Our platform not only makes learning personal finance fun and engaging but also empowers you to take control of your financial journey. You can easily track your spending, monitor your financial goals, and stay on top of your progress as you level up your money management skills.

How we built it

We utilized Eclipse IDE as our primary development environment to style and build our website. This platform was particularly valuable due to its robust support for the Dynamic Java Project feature, allowing us to design and implement both the front-end and back-end components with precision. By leveraging this feature, we had complete control over the website's appearance, functionality, and overall user experience. We also integrated interactive features designed to enhance financial literacy and educate our clients effectively. These included engaging games and a personalized budget generator tailored to clients' income. Eclipse provided us with the necessary tools to seamlessly manage the integration of these elements, ensuring our website operated efficiently while maintaining an appealing and user-friendly design.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced was connecting MongoDB to our webpage to create a more robust and dynamic database system. Additionally, our limited coding experience presented obstacles, and we initially considered using WIX for simplicity but ultimately decided to build our website from scratch to gain more control and flexibility. To overcome our lack of experience, we relied on YouTube tutorials to teach ourselves how to build the framework for the website and then intuitively expanded our knowledge from there. We also encountered an issue with the Eclipse IDE, as an error prevented us from downloading the latest version. However, after troubleshooting extensively, we were able to resolve the problem and proceed with our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since this was our first hackathon, navigating the process of forming a team and working on a project was both unfamiliar and exciting. We’re proud of showing up, collaborating as a team, and successfully completing our first hackathon project. Notably, two of our team members had no prior coding experience, making this event an incredibly rewarding introduction to the world of coding and teamwork.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to effectively work as a team, leveraging the diverse skill sets of our group, which included two computer science majors and two finance majors. This allowed us to divide the work efficiently, with each member contributing their expertise while also learning from one another. The computer science majors focused on building and deploying the website using Eclipse, including creating features like user input functionality and interactive elements such as matching cards that can flip. Meanwhile, the finance majors contributed their knowledge to enhance the website’s focus on financial literacy, helping us all gain a better understanding of how to plan for our future. This collaboration was a valuable learning experience that highlighted the benefits of combining technical and financial expertise.

What's next for GLAM

We hope to add more features like tracking your knowledge of financial literacy through levels and achievements. Furthermore, we aim to add a point system for the games included as well as a registration page so users can track their goals, and knowledge, and overall have a more personalized experience.