EconoMeme

Inspiration

On a 3 hour car ride to this event, we starting talking about how memes die and explode rather rapidly. We realized we could create a virtual stock market where users buy and sell shares of memes much like the real stock market and create a project that is both fun and educational at the same time.The goal of this project was to refine our technical skills in a fun way while becoming more professional in the process.

What it does

We created a Meme Economy where users can buy and sell shares of each meme based off a value determined by current Google Trends search data. We check the total searches every morning at 9am so that there is no fluctuation based off who is awake and searching on the internet (no day trading).

How we built it

For the sake of simplicity, we manually picked some memes and entered the search terms on Google Trends. We exported a csv file from Trends that has the value of each made the backend with Java, with a MemeLibrary class that takes the value of each meme by day and adds the values to an array. This class then creates profile objects using the Profile class that stores information about each user. This Profile class is used to buy and sell shares and holds the current value of cash and total number of shares.

We created a front end GUI in Adobe XD and if given more time would create this same UI in HTML and CSS. We used Google Cloud Platform to seamlessly collaborate on the same java application through a linux console (shell).

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of problems trying to link our java code with some form of a front end. We tried using Google Cloud platform, but the learning curve was steep and the front end that we used for that was extremely simple.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a great looking UI demo, that could be implemented with HTML and CSS if we had more time. We created most of the mechanics of buying and selling shares.