Moneywhys

Inspiration

All of the team members are in their early teens and this for most of them, this is their first Technica (and for one their first hackathon!). They all know about the amount of debt that students come out of college with. None of the girls want a large amount of debt that they have to pay off for most of their lives. They have started saving up, and they want to encourage other girls to do the same.

What it does

Moneywhys will help kids learn the skills about saving up for college in an interactive, gaming experience. The information will be conveyed in video, text, and game format.

How we built it

This app was built using the app builder Thunkable, a blocky app builder that works on Android and Apple phones. The Firebase database was used for authentication and will be used to store notes from the user in the future. The girls coded a web page using HTML, where they embedded a Scratch game. The Scratch game is the game that will be used to teach children about the importance of money.

Challenges we ran into

At first, the girls wanted to code their game directly on Thunkable. Thunkable's sprite and gaming features are very new and prone to malfunctioning and updating at inopportune moments. The girls could not get their sprites to talk or move around the phone, so they turned to Scratch (a format that they are very used to) to make their game. They embedded the game into their web page, and then integrated the web page into their app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The girls are very proud of the Firebase authentication and the way that they thought around all of the problems that they encountered.

What we learned

The girls learned how to use Thunkable in new ways and some of them learned how to code a webpage and embed a Scratch game into it.

What's next for Moneywhys

Many changes will come to Moneywhys in the future. There will be an interactive notes feature that will allow kids to track their spending habits and take notes on their saving strategies. There will be greater security features and more games for kids to do, that will be directly on the app and not on a website.

Built With

• firebase
• html
• scratch
• thunkable