Singapore Stack Exchange

Gameplay screenshot

Inspiration

Some of our team members are going to trading companies for our internships. In order to prepare and out of curiosity, we would like to learn a little bit about stocks and learn the common way to gather/scrape them from websites.

What it does

A simple game to simulate stock trading. Basically, you start out with 1000 SGD and will buy and sell stocks for 1 minute. Your final score will be the percentage of profit you have after 1 minute of gameplay has passed.

How we built it

Our project has two main parts, the scraper and the frontend.

We use python to collect data about some stocks' performance in the recent months from an open API alphavantage.co. The collected data is then processed into a JSON format and passed to the frontend.

We use React.js with MaterialUI to build the frontend. The frontend displays the stocks in a meaningful format (chart) and implements the gameplay logic and controls.

Challenges we ran into

We think the main challenges are that we can't meet onsite to work on this together and every collaboration has to be done online. This is because some of us are currently back in our home country and will only return back to Singapore when school starts again.

To resolve the issue of collaboration, we chopped the tasks into small pieces and posted them as Github issues. Anyone interested in the task may assign themselves to it. In this way, everyone will know what others are doing or planning to do and therefore there will not be an instance where two people are working on the same task. As a result, there are no conflicting tasks and the project was able to be completed smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we can do a minimum viable product (MVP) all within 24 hours, even though we are not always online all the time, and that we can't meet together to work on this.

One thing that we can improve is definitely the UI. Due to the limited time, we didn't come up with beautiful color schemes and complicated layouts.

What we learned

Some of us refreshed our knowledge of frontend development by once again diving into React.js. We also learned about plotting stocks and how to scrape stocks from the web.