Orchard

Grow your Garden
Expense tracking experience

Inspiration

We decided on using Scotiabank’s category as a starting point for our hack.

As we reflected on our own financial habits as adults, we knew about the concept of saving money but the majority of us didn’t exercise this since we never practiced it growing up. While there are tools now to help us with managing our finances, a lot of the tools that exist are text-heavy with minimal visuals, making it difficult for us to see what exactly is happening with our money. Seeing the value in practicing saving money, this motivated us to create this app to help young girls we know to start saving young.

Playing on the common saying that “money doesn’t grow on trees”, the idea behind Orchard sprouted—that trees can grow from your money.

What it does

Orchard gamifies expense tracking so youths will easily learn the benefits of saving money. Orchard is an expense tracking app that utilizes an orchard to inspire youths to save. Orchard visually shows an orchard that will grow bigger every time the youth saves money, as well as losing leaves when the youth spends money. Every new savings goal is a new tree in the orchard. Youths can watch it grow from a sprout to a beautiful tree. Orchard also allows the parents to monitor the child’s savings and spendings, and add tasks for the child to earn money from.

How we built it

Orchard is written in Javascript, HTML and CSS, utilizing the Vue framework. Design images, wireframes and mockups were primarily built on Figma and Illustrator.

Challenges we ran into

Most of our challenges lied in the implementation, particularly the syncing of events between components and updating the Vue store. We also had trouble with making the CSS responsive.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we were able to work as a team, communicating clearly and being able to ask one another for help as needed.

What we learned

We learned to take an idea from scratch and see it to fruition, discussing the features, implementing the application, and collaborating with one another’s strengths.

Technologically, we collectively learned to start a software project from scratch, deploying it to github, learning the Vue framework, and learning and designing the UX/UI with Illustrator and Figma.

What's next for Orchard

Now that a web version has been built, a mobile app can be next! By building a mobile app as well, parents and their children will be able to track their expenses on the go.