Front Page
The bank

Devpost submission

Inspiration

Today, managing finances effectively has become ever more important with the need for money to grow over time a concern of every common individual. At the same time, the complexity of the financial sector into which money can be invested is at its absolute peak. The main problem we identified as part of the guiding question was the lack of awareness about the importance of financial literacy amongst the youth.

The main focus of our app is to enable individuals to explore investing options they have at their disposal, in a risk free environment so that they can work out strategies which work for them. In the position of a university graduate, users understand the importance of being financially wise by getting a first hand experience of the consequences of not doing so.

What it does

We call our app ‘Liabilities’ and it tracks the journey of a university graduate who has to pay off their financial liabilities and save enough money by the end of the year. They start with a given monthly salary and faced with fixed monthly expenditures of food and rent, they have to manage their income wisely such that by the end of the game, they have a given amount of money.

By putting users in the very-real situation that they might face in the future, we show how making financial choices wisely is of paramount importance. The personal aspect of the game helps show how it could indeed be the players themselves that are in this position.

How we built it

This app runs on Flask, using the python for the backend and the user interface built using HTML and CSS. In the process of building this app, we started from scratch and worked our way through designing the user interface is such a way that we could best achieve what we had in mind to solve the issue we identified as being the lack of awareness about financial literacy.

For the front end - which is basically the game interface - we designed a character based game with a top down viewpoint where the character can move in the location that we simulated. This is supposed to represent the various investment options that an individual can make use of to grow their money.

The back end is where the game got its connection to real life with us simulating the movement of stocks in response to major global events which the player will get to know through the news that is delivered to them in the game. We did this by taking into consideration real life stock data from the IEX cloud API.

Challenges we ran into

Our journey started with choosing our track which was relatively easy due to our interest in the fintech sector. We then came up with the idea to make an interactive game to help a younger population manage their financial assets. However, from then on, the journey was not as smooth sailing.

We had very ambitious plans for the 24hrs which along with the front end design included very intensive back-end algorithms and stock simulations. We frequently encountered small challenges in front end developing which were quickly resolved. However, the main issue arrived when we started work on our real time database. Our goal was to connect real time stock values to our game and track the users progress in real time. This proved very time consuming as we faced many errors which we were unable to debug. However, a fresh start the next day allowed us to think clearly and continue our work.

Another major issue we faced throughout was due to the misalignment of objects in our game. This, despite being a relatively easy issue to solve, took a long amount of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Throughout the course of this hackathon we constantly surprised ourselves with our accomplishments and we’re extremely proud of the fact that we were able to achieve our rather ambiyious goals we had set for ourselves. We were especially pleased that despite a few snags, we did not require any external help and were able to diagnosis the issues ourselves.

In a four member team, we were able to work very well together and delegate the tasks depending on our skillset. At the same time, we helped each other if they were facing any problems in the tasks they had taken up. Through this teamwork, we were able to accomplish the task on time.

What we learned

Through the course of this hackathon, we improved upon our skills especially related to real time coding. It was our first intstance of integrating real time stock values into a website but we were able to learn it fast enough to integrate it into our game. We also delved deeper into the world of finance to make sure our gamecould equip the player with all necessary skills they would need.

Another aspect of our learning journey was in the virtual world. This hackathon was the first instance of any of us exploring a virtual playground and we extremely impressed by its potential. This was one of the reasons we decided to make our game like a virtual playground where the user can do whatever they wish to.

Most importantly, we learnt important values of teawork and time management. We were able to squeeze an ambitious project withing the time frame which was a great learning journey for us. We learned to cooperate well as a team and were amazed by the productivity when we all work together.

What's next for Liabilities

In the next update of the game, we hope to achieve our main objective of making the game a more perfect simulation of the financial world. This would allow players to get ever more familiarity with the financial markets that exists. We would do this by perhaps extending the game’s duration so that there is more involvement from the user over a longer period of time.

We would also like to increase the number of stocks that are available so that the challenge of the game increases and improves user involvement. This would also apply to indexed funds since we too are not experts at financial literacy so during this hackathon, we had to grapple with our limited understanding and make the best of what we knew. The evaluation of various types of indexed funds was too far beyond our reach.

Similarly, we would have introduced bonds into the game however owing to their complexity, at last we didn’t. In general, we believe that this game has a lot of scope for growing given the expertise and research that may be put into it. These changes would definitely make it a much better tool for learning about financial literacy.