Inst@ck Exchange

A fun application to teach students about the stock market using Instagram!

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Overview

Inst@ck Exchange is a fun and education tool for teenagers to learn about the stock market. Instead of companies, our tool uses Instagram celebrities and their follower count as the stock. The user buys stock in a celebrity in the hope that their follower count will increase so they can resell the stock for a profit.

Inspiration

Our project, Inst@ck Exchange, arose from the current stock market learning tools being not appealing to the younger generation. Research tells us that teenagers know very little about the stock market and financial literacy. Our project this weekend aims to provide an innovative, educational, and fun tool to help teenagers gain this gap of information.

What it does

Inst@ck scraps the follower count from the top 10 accounts on Instagram every 7 seconds. It then calculates the follower count change, the price of the stock, and it's new graph location. The user is able to buy stock using their coins and can sell their stock later.

How we built it

Inst@ck is built using HTML/CSS/Javascript, Bootstrap, for the front-end, and Python for the backend. For the backend, we used a web crawler to visit 10 popular Instagram profiles to gather data about their followers. The crawler is continuous and gathers the follower data every 7 seconds.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulties with finding a suitable API to retrieve data from, so in the end, we resorted to web scraping public Instagram accounts for their followers.

What's next for Inst@ck Exchange

There are so many places we feel we could take this project. For instance, we want to improve the site so it can update in real time, so users can see the most updated prices for stacks. Additionally, we want to increase the size of our stock market by including more Instagram accounts as well as implementing a user system where users can compete with their friends to see who makes the most profit. In the future, we hope to upload our web app to online to our domain, instack.tech.

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