Inspiration: Managing money in innovative ways while positively impacting the communities around us is something that our team is extremely passionate about. When we heard about the Associated Bank round feature, we knew that it could be used in a non demanding light to help users save money while donating to charities that mean something to them with, essentially, each and every purchase they make.
What it does: This application takes user input values representing bank finance information and allows the specific user to create an account that displays checking and savings account balances. Using the round-up feature, the user is given the option to round a purchase value up to the nearest dollar or 10 dollars which can be donated to a local charity of their choice or put into savings for a longer term goal. The user can also choose a preference for the ratio of how often they would like to donate to charities and how often they would like to round up into their savings. With the money put in to charities, we planned on making a leaderboard of sorts with your friends and the community to display who is donating the most and in turn, use that to incentivize more donations to charities.
How we built it: Using newly-learned languages of HTML and CSS, we built the front end to display a colorful home page and login pages as well as interactive buttons for users to sign in with a specific username and password, or register a new account if they did not already have one. Using JavaScript, the backend allows the user to connect their username and account number to specific dashboard account that displays their balances. The round-up feature and donation options are included for a complex user engagement.
Challenges we ran into: The completion of our project was slowed down by the the fact that we had to learn new coding languages, such as HTML and CSS, in order to better implement our idealized image of the front end results. Our backend had issues due to problems in collaboration. A secondary backend needed to be rushed at the end due to these conflicts.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: Despite our issues in the backend and learning with new technologies, we are very proud of the work we were able to complete and the ideas we put forward to boost people's involvement in money management and charity donation.
What we learned: Creating a project within a 24 hour time period can be quite the learning experience, especially for first-time hackers. Working as a team required lots of communication and collaboration in order to split the workload, assign deadlines, and submit a cohesive final product to achieve team objectives.
What's next for Mad Money (Round Up Money Management Application): Better improvements in backend as well as an enhanced user engagement interface.
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