The Giving App

Inspiration

Small businesses have suffered during COVID-19. Additionally, people are feeling more disconnected from their communities than ever before because the face-to-face community service has become unsafe.
In reality, there are limited virtual interaction opportunities for users and small businesses. Therefore we decided to help small businesses thrive and connect people to their community by designing a mobile application with NCR's APIs.

What it does

The Giving App provides the user with contactless opportunities to give back to the community. More specifically, The Giving App suggests donations being run by that business after users complete a transaction at a local business. By showing a milestone bar, the user feels a sense of achievement operationalized. Additionally, community crowdfunding can be advertised in a non-invasive way.

How we built it

NCR BSP API Technology:
- Orders API
- Selling API
- Catalog API
Integrated the Selling Configuration APIs in one single Restful API with Python Flask
Used NCR API to store and retrieve user information
Prototyped the application using NCR Design Systems in Figma with Flutter
Attended the UI/UX design workshop and used Mural for our Ideas Brainstorm

Challenges we ran into

Coming up with the idea that helps our communities and small business
Understand the functionality of NCR's APIs
Set up HMAC authorization to make API call with python
Customize Items and their Category of Selling API to fit our application
Integrate multiple APIs in one API call to make donating process concise
Transfer our UI design accomplished by NCR Design System Figma to Flutter application
Make API calls in Flutter

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We came up with the idea and implemented the project in such a short period. Although a lot of challenges and difficulties came up during the developing process, we overcame them shortly by discussing in the group, searching online, and consulting with the mentors. Plenty of new tools are introduced from the workshops and sponsors, we quickly got familiar with them and applied them to our project. As students, we are proud of our strong self-learning ability. In the end, everyone felt they gained a lot from the hackathon.

In the project aspect, our application has the ability to build the future by connecting small businesses to users and to the community. It can be generalized to organizations other than small businesses thus has the potential to help the entire society.

What we learned

NCR APIs and security using hashing
Retrieve useful information using NCR APIs
Design and implement Restful API for a frontend application
How different APIs can be used together to create an application
UI/UX design insights, using Figma as engineers (not designers) to create a decent looking app
Develop apps for multiple platforms with a single codebase using Flutter