Plutus

Inspiration

Before the Hackathon even started, a week prior to be exact me and my group mates met up in order to brain storm ideas, and one of the the top three we felt most passionately about was a financial literacy app, although we are only young adults, throughout our lives, we have found the dream of financial freedom extremely alluring. Through this passion we found that most people in our generation feel the same way we do. However, they many of them are afraid to start getting into finances, whether it be the complex language, not knowing where to start, or simply not being able to pay attention long enough. We believe there is and must be an easier and more interactive way for people to become financial literate, and in turn giving others opportunity and dream to become financially free one day.

What it does

Plutus revolutionizes financial education by rewarding your learning journey. With our app, you gain crucial financial literacy through engaging modules, earning cash rewards as you progress. These rewards aren't just numbers – they're your capital to practice investing in a simulated (real time) market environment. It's risk-free learning with real-world skills, where every module mastered is a step towards confident, informed investing.

How we built it

To first begin building Plutus we took a user/task centered approach. We first identified the problem we were trying to solve, then the several types users that would be using our app. we built personalities around them and why current solutions would be less effective and or efficient in tackling this issue. After identifying the features the application would have based on the users we then proceeded to requirements. The requirements would help us organize what components we MUST have, which we should have, could have and which we will exclude. We then thought of an innovative twist as we were aware there would be fierce competition. We decided to use an API and simulate a real time market, as Users complete "Paths and Modules" through our app and interactive games/quizzes they earn money which they spend in our simulated market, this allows users to out their knowledge to the test.

Challenges we ran into

Time was a huge issue for us, and we spent hours planning out everything in-order to have a smoother coding expiernece. We were excited and maybe bit off more than we could chew as we spent the literal next 24 hours getting it done, however, we are not ashamed of our work in anyway nor do we want you to think it was rushed, even though we didn't get to do everything we wanted to. As, a team we are extremely proud of our work and are very excited to see what others think of it as we can truly say we have it 110%.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Truly this expiernece was a challenging one, 4 out of our 5 team members had never worked with firebase, react-native, or polygon API. However, we wanted the challenge and embraced it. Figma was another big problem we stated earlier that we put a lot of effort into the planning process and the Figma alone took several hours, but the products we came up with were worth the effort. And the graph simulating the market was an extremely hard endeavor, and we believe to be one of the main highlights of the application.

What we learned

For starters the Importance of Passion-Driven Projects: our team's shared passion for financial literacy and financial freedom significantly motivated the project. This showed us that having a genuine interest and belief in what you're working on can drive innovation and dedication. Learning Through Challenge: Despite the majority of our team being unfamiliar with certain technologies (Firebase, React Native, Polygon API, Figma), we embraced the learning curve. It was a way for us to step out of your comfort zone can lead to significant achievements and skill development. Time Management and Scope Management was a big lesson for us as the challenges of time constraints and scope creep in project development. Even with enthusiastic planning and a strong work ethic, managing what you can realistically achieve within a given timeframe is vital.

What's next for Plutus

Integration with AI, and to continue building on this product we will grow Plutus and create a full implementation for it and hopefully one day we achieve our dream.