Got Finance

Inspiration

Growing up in the United States, the three of us did not receive a strong personal finance background in school. Most of us first began to learn basic financial practices in our senior year. By then, most of us were already working and managing our own money. We believe that, as children, learning finance is crucial for future success. For this reason, we wanted to create an application that made the process enjoyable and easy. Our target audience is late elementary school through middle school.

What it does

Our app creates a mock persona that children must keep alive by simulating regular human behavior. They must choose to buy items and based on what they prioritize, the persona's health, entertainment, food, and luxury levels will be adjusted. Our crafted algorithm will then classify the persona as alive or dead based on the combined values of the four factors.

How we built it

We built the web application by using the Python-based application-building library Tkinter. We used the package's functionalities to implement buttons, labels, images, status updates, and create an interactive game-like interface. We used the PyCharm development environment to build our application. Lastly, we used beautiful-soup for web-scraping and then used Google Cloud's text-to-speech API to use the extracted text and turn it into audio.

Challenges we ran into

We had a hard time adjusting our layout to fit the screen. The functional capabilities of Tkinter's widgets were limiting and we had to often work around the limitations by manipulating our idea. For example, instead of progress bars, we implemented color changing labels to indicate the status of features. The layout and widget limitations combined made it difficult to maintain functionality while not compromising the aesthetic appeal of the application. Lastly, we struggled in extracting text from online articles in order to turn it into an audio output. Knowing that many children are auditory learners or would much rather listen to than read articles, we made sure that including the text to speech functionality was a priority. The Google API was confusing at first, but after discussing our idea with the Google Cloud Platform mentors, we were able to accomplish our initial idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud to have successfully used Google's text-to-speech API to create a more interactive environment. Since our app is intended for younger children, we wanted to make sure that each graphical aspect contributed to making a captivating learning environment.

What we learned

We learned how to use Google's cloud services and implement them on websites articles to extract text and turn it into speech. We became familiar with the widgets that Tkinter provides. We also learned how to format web applications despite limited widget capabilities.

What's next for Got Finance

We would like to turn our web application into a mobile application and monetize it through the use of AppLovin's API (ad revenue). We would also like to add a stock market feature which would use actual stock data (Blackrock's API) and display a simplified version of each stock and value on the app for the children to explore. They would be able to learn the principles of macroeconomics and investment strategies. By incorporating macroeconomic ideas, we would be able to contrast the microeconomic ideas that our game teaches and provide a more well rounded finance education.

Built With

beautiful-soup
capital-one
google-web-speech-api
lxml
pycharm
python
text-to-speech-google
tkinter

Submitted to

LA Hacks 2019

Created by

I was the project manager for Got Finance. I created an outline of the functions our web application would have and then drew out the prototype designs. I then researched and chose the APIs that we would use. I decided upon Nessie from Capital One and Text-to-Speech from Google Cloud Platform. I overlooked both frontend and backend code and managed the obstacles we faced by manipulating the initial application design or looking into additional packages that could be used to fulfill our app's requirements.

I created the algorithm that we used to define financial status in our game. I also found the articles we would scrape text from to create a preliminary finance and economic curriculum for children.

fieryashes
I built the back-end structure of our application. Back-end functionalities included extracting the data from the various APIs we used, so that our other modules would be able to use and process the data.

I assisted with the aesthetic improvement of widgets in our application, such as the size, color, and fonts of labels, as well as positioning of the various widgets (i.e., buttons, labels, etc.).

Andrew Chen
I worked on the code for Got Finance. I coded the project in Python, as that is the language I have recently acquired experience in. I created the app using TkInter, a built-in python module meant for app development. I had no prior experience using TkInter, but building the app has drastically improved my ability to use the module for future projects.

Using the resources compiled by Alisha, Andrew and I were able to create a majority of the functions for for Got Finance. I worked on a majority of the Front-end processes of the project, such as setting up the interface, getting the images and links to display correctly, and modifying the texts' positioning. I also coded a handful of back-end processes, namely the algorithm used to define the financial status within our app.

AaronShah2 Shah

Updates

fieryashes started this project — Mar 30, 2019 01:26 PM EDT

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