Spruce Banking Project

Spruce Banking: forward-thinking financially and environmentally

Inspiration

Canada is ranked 6th from the bottom on the 2016 climate change performance index and has the 2nd worst carbon emissions level out of 61 countries. The UN Head of Environment says it will cost 5 to 7 trillion dollars to fix the issues. Our generation needs to be financially responsible for themselves so the government can focus on sustainable development. However, with one-third of our Canadians not making enough money to pay off their financial bills, we aimed to teach financial literacy and raise awareness about our environment through our user-friendly personal banking app.

What it does

Spruce Banking is an Android app that is meant to seamlessly incorporate personal banking into helping to improve the environment by facilitating sustainable development in Canada. Its users are currently able to sign in to the app’s very own bank account and register transactions in their savings account. Whenever money is deposited, a tree is planted in real-life, and they are given a virtual tree to represent their success. This encourages financial literacy among individuals by encouraging the saving of money, as well as brings notice to environmental and sustainability issues around the world.

How we built it

We used HTML/CSS, Java, JavaScript, XML to write our code and implement it to build our android app.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was compiling all of the code we had each written individually. We had members working on functionality, design, and layout, but in the end, it had to be put together. Since none of us have ever built an app or done a project where languages had to interact, our challenge was incorporating the CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, and XML to create one whole product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the sole fact that we came up with such an unconventional idea between two sectors that have a lot of potential to assist in helping the world become greener. We’re also proud that we were able to carry out the idea to make a real living, breathing app! We’re all high school students, and half of us have only taken one computer science course, so putting everyone’s skills together turned out to be very complimentary.

What we learned

As a group of first-time hackers, we learned how to put all of our skills together to create one uniformed coding project. The experience of building an android app within 36 hours was a completely different challenge that we faced. We learned to manage our time wisely within those 36 hours, plan and coordinate accordingly, learn different coding languages at times to speed up the process, and implement our ideas into reality.

What's next for Spruce Banking Project

Before Spruce Banking Project is released on the Google Play Store, we wish to expand it by adding more relevant and useful features that our users are actually able to use. Some top priorities would be to fully integrate this app with banking systems in real-life such that Spruce would be able to track all transactions in their bank account and base the tree-planting off of that. Additionally, we could also add features such as a more in-depth goals section and a financial analysis system. We believe that these features will allow us to attract a broader and greater audience so that we can influence the world both financially and environmentally.