Money Tree | Devpost

Official welcome page
Goal
Garden of accomplishments
Main Menu on the Phone Application

Inspiration

Every day we head out into the world spending money we’ve worked hard to earn on things we don’t need, and don’t even truly want. Be it out of force of habit or social pressure, the decisions we make about our money directly impact our financial savings and are directly affected by our financial literacy. Among teenagers, young adults, working individuals and more, this problem of overspending plagues us daily. An effective solution is necessary, and with Money Tree, it is immenent.

What it does

Money Tree is more than just an app that helps you save money. It teaches you the value of tracking your finances and most importantly, puts into perspective all the unnecessary purchases you make on the daily. When the app realizes you’ve spent a significant amount of time inside a store which you identified as a source of overspending (eg. Starbucks, McDonalds, Timmies, etc.) it sends you a pop-up. You’re then prompted to open up the app where you’re asked if you were planning on spending money. If you were not, you're free to leave. However, if you were, the app asks you how much you are about to spend. After entering said amount, depending on what form of motivation you believe is most effective for you, the app aims to deter you from spending unnecessarily. This is done in one of three customizable ways: verifying your rational thinking through questions, showcasing how many hours of work are equivalent to the amount you’re about to spend and a number of other items you could buy if you do not buy this thing. However the most unique part of Money Tree is the seed of savings you are able to cultivate if you stick it through with your financial goals. The fruition of your increased financial savings and reaching your goals is documented within the garden where you keep all your grown plants (achieved goals) from the past. There is also the key option to donate your savings to important environmental causes, such as the Australian bush fires, when you choose to not spend your money.

How we built it

Money Tree was created using XCode and Swift in order to deploy an IOS application. Firebase is used as our storage platform and can be used to save the data collected from the user and and any additional features we might add on in the future.

Challenges we ran into

This was all of our first time using XCode and Swift. It was challenging to first get orientated with the application and language, and to debug considering the time crunch. Furthermore, this was the first hackathon for many of us. We also faced problems using git to coordinate our code and had to spend time debugging it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of all the new friendships made as we had never worked in a group together before. We’re proud of the HAND-DRAWN aesthetics on our app done by one of our group member and the fact that we learned to use XCode & Swift.

What we learned

We learned about the IOS deployment features offered by XCode. We also learned about Syntactical differences between Swift and other programming languages we were used to like Python