Many Americans lack financial literacy or financial management skills. In our own experience, this is due to a non-existent or subpar education on the subject. Not only do our current systems fail to instill beneficial financial values in students from an early age, but provide only a few opportunities for adults, especially those in lower socioeconomic classes, to learn how to create an effective budget or to utilize a budget that will facilitate their path to solvency. As a result, we created Common ¢ents, an application that guides users’ financial habits through budget suggestions that are flexible and dynamic, based on the costs of living and financial data from the user’s location.
Common Cents takes in data and builds a budget plan based on the customer's current balance and personal preferences/priorities. It displays the information in the app by utilizing Microstrategy Data Visualization. Our app circumvents the common weaknesses of budgets, including unnecessary rigidity, lack of specificity, and disregard of details pertaining to not only the user, but the conditions around them.
We used java to build the foundation of our calculation and combined xml, java, and android development kits to create the interface of the app, in addition to utilizing microstrategy’s data analysis and visualization
We didn't quite know how to build an app or use xml. As a group coming together for the first time at Technica, we experienced problems using GitHub and combining our versions of the app. Moreover, creating the graphic user interface was a challenge as none of us had used applications germane to this goal before.
We are proud that we learned how to connect linking activities with button on xml. We were able to put together a project somewhat comprehensible, despite working together for the first time. Finally, we are proud that we learned how to accept input from an android app.
We learned how to use xml to import fonts and integrate languages to create a GUI, as well as how to use GitHub as a way to bring together code.
Common Cents is planning on integrating the Google Maps API to use location information to compare prices in the area that fit within the budget. Depending on where the user lives and their mode of transportation, the location data will enhance the capabilities of our project by enabling us to create a more personalized data plan that takes into account variables in addition to the users’ data. Thus, our project will become more holistic and appealing to users, who will not be able to access the the comprehensive cost analysis data that Common cents incorporates into its algorithm. Furthermore, we plan on tracking the user’s expenses to create an algorithm that will adjust the budget accordingly, and on creating multiple visual graphs for the user to easily interpret their budget. We will use MicroStrategy to create the graphs.
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