No One Left A-Loan

No One Left A-Loan: Crowdfunding for Loans! (Home A-Loaners Association) #HAAHAAHAA
Where students and donors can login
Student and donor account registration, time to Post Ma-Loan!!!
Home view where all student loans can be viewed. Feeling philanthropic? Donate with just one click!
No need to feel ashamed! This twitter feed is here to remind you you're not A-Loan! Healthy convos on debt and other important topics!
Profile view where you can view your personal info and change your picture

Inspiration

As students afflicted by the Student Loan Debt Crisis ourselves, as well as unfulfilled supporters for crowdfunding websites such as GoFundMe and Kickstarter, we wanted to create a more a trustworthy platform to encourage donors to help out and promote #HealthyConversations revolving what could be considered a topic that's difficult to speak about.

What it does

No One Left A-Loan is an iOS app that allows users to sign up as either students or donors. On the student side, it allows users to post a small description about themselves as well as the amount of loan debt they owe on a general feed so that donors may help them out through the simple click of a button. We decided to omit profile pictures on the home feed to avoid potential biases when it comes to funding students. In addition, it aims to promote #HealthyConversations revolving around difficult topics to speak about out of fear of public humiliation, such as debt.

How we built it

To ensure donors that students they donate to are indeed in debt rather than simply saying they are like in other crowdsourcing websites, we utilized the Capital One API to retrieve the true balance of loans associated with the student's account and displayed it directly on the general feed. We integrated the Twitter API to retrieve tweets in realtime associated with hashtags such as #blackexcellence, #reform, and #debt to show users that they are not alone in their situation.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulties navigating views and learning how to use SwiftUI, especially because two of our teammates do not have much experience in iOS development. In addition, decoding the responses from the Twitter API and Capital One API proved to be challenging using Swift, but we managed to pull through!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were extremely proud of the fact that we were able to implement not one, but two APIs for the first time since we've gone to hackathons! It allowed us to really see how far we've come since we began hacking as freshmen all the way up until now as seniors.

What we learned

All of us were newer to SwiftUI, and two of us have very little experience with Swift at all, so we all learned a lot about iOS development! In addition, we were able to learn how to integrate APIs and work with and decode their JSON responses using Swift!