investHER

"Empower. Educate. Elevate."

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Inspiration

Women, especially from marginialized communities and developing countries, are usually unsure about navigating through finances and investing in their futures. A quintessential aspect of today's society is being financially independent and to be able to handle money responsibly. We wanted to create an application that empowers young women to learn how to manage their finances early on interactively, while also educating them about various methods to practice smart spending. In all, our project aims to bridge the gap between women and financial freedom.

What it does

We have made a game-based interactive model, which helps an individual learn about how to manage their finances through simulation. It starts out with creating a user profile, with a variety of avatars to choose from, and the individual also gets app-based money. It goes on to a screen where you can select categories ranging from high school to a full time job. The application also sets a social scenario, where one is given a choice to spend money or save up. Moreover, there are many scenarios of phishing scams where the individual loses some money they earned throughout the game if they click the link. Additionally, we have incorporated real-time stock market information that can be accessed through the different levels of the app, and provided a simulation where they can "invest" their money to "buy" and "sell" bonds to get a feel of how to invest in the real world. We have also added an interactive learning tool, that uses generative AI to generate content based on real life analogies.

How we built it

Firebase: For authentication and storage of the user credentials
Python: Used to generate the backend of the app
Kivy: Used to generate the graphical user interace and make it interactive
GitHub: Used to manage the repositories
Y-Finance: Used to get stocks data and analyze it
Cohere: Used to generate content for explaining financial terms
Matplotlib: Used to generate graphs for stock analysis
GeeksForGeeks: Open source code

Challenges we ran into

As we are all first time hackers, and we were using GenAI, Firebase and Kivy for the first time, it was a steep learning curve. We had some issues with pull and push requests in GitHub, and the incorporation of API with the real-time stock market information. It was also challenging to incorporate and integrate the different technologies with each other.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had delegated the work amongst ourselves, so putting everything together and watching the flow of program was something we were proud of. Figuring out the bugs and debugging everything by ourselves also gave us a sense of accomplishment. We are really proud that we are able to develop a real life simulation of stock market where a user can spend the money they can earn by educating themselves and gaining more knowledge about the financial world.

What we learned

Since we are first time hackers, this experience helped us learn a lot of new things. It taught us how to collaborate effectively in a team, simultaneously edit code and use Kivy. Additionally, it taught us that it takes a long time to build apps and games, and that it takes an army to bring a vision to work smoothly.

What's next for investHER

We would like to touch upon the other aspects of the finance world through our app, (incorporating building a 401(k), seting up your own demat account, mutual funds, taxes, etc.) We would like to generate more content for educating and create a more robust investment portfolio simulation where the users can utlilize the features.

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