Candy Coin

Inspiration

With the lack of centralized locations or services for people to trade candy of all ages, a system where students can trade candy with others around the world safely is important to society.

What it does

Candy Coin is a market that organizes and exchanges candy with other users. It creates an incentive to keep the spirit of Halloween alive throughout the year as Trick or Treating will be much more popular as the trading market grows. For example, a sought after candy such as Hersheys', will be bought and sold much more because of its demand. A major feature of Candy Coin comes in its use of incentivizes such as schools where users are able to register themselves as teachers and reward their students with candy for exceptional behavior and performance in class.

How we built it

• mysql for database
• the framework we used was node.js,
• the backend management was postgres
• express was our middleware

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that we ran into creating Candy Coin was the implementation of Auth0 and the website's inability to recognize the environment variables in regards to the domain we chose to host our web application. This hindered the progress as utilizing an authentication framework provided by Auth0 would have been vital to being able to store safe and secure information. Another challenge was using the SQL database to hash all the passwords stored, but not being able to store a larger sized hash due to limitations based on their server requirements. Debugging this was a nightmare, and prevented us from accessing and logging in with particular users that were created.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A major accomplishment that we would love to share is how we were able to complete our FIRST major hackathon ever in our life utilizing various technologies and frameworks. In any other setting, it would be difficult to bring together the multitude of tools which were enhanced by the free trials and access via MLH. Another major accomplishment we had was deploying a web application using knowledge of CSS & HTML to create a polished interface for any user who access the page. A well-designed application demonstrates easier navigation and longer time spent on the application. Especially for ours, candy exchanging requires constant monitoring and trading.

What we learned

We learned how to use an authentication tool such as Auth0 to authenticate users using the python library with the flask framework. Before this, we had never heard of this particular framework, and using it here was exciting. To create a pleasing User Interface, we researched ways to develop a proof of concept using the Tkinter package. Like any python package, the documentation served helpful in learning on how to create a GUI in an efficient manner.

What's next for Candy Coin?

For the hackathon, we had multiple ideas that were not realized by the deadline which included a system for parents to reward their kids for chores, good behavior, etc. A more in-depth interpersonal system where users are able to connect with each other using a Friends database.

Built With

• auth0
• data
• github
• heroku
• mysql
• postgresql
• python