PgyBnk | Devpost

Inspiration

Finance is still considered a taboo topic by many. Many have an aversion to talk about their earnings, their investment strategies or how they budget.

When we saw the PIMCO challenge to build tools for financial literacy for children, we knew that this is what we wanted to work on - something that promotes healthy financial habits, encourages people to talk about money and can be used by children.

In our quest to make something that children understand, we went old school - piggy banks - the first financial institution for many children across the world.

thus was born PgyBnk - piggy bank of the 21st century. PgyBnk is a new way of using a PgyBnk - a more personal, secure and transparent way - with the same old joy of using real money.

What it does

The present of PgyBnk involves multiple features, with space to add more in the future.

The core of the app is trust. The way it works is that every time a child is supposed to get money - be it pocket money or earned - the parent/guardian can add that amount to a connected parent/guardian-child account. The child can then ask for money and the parent/guardian can subtract the asked amount from the account.

How we built it

We built the app with a Flask backend and used vanilla HTML and CSS to design templates and styling the multiple pages involved in the app. We also attached a Flask SQL-alchemy database to store information and dynamically change the data being shown to the user. We then deployed it on Python Anywhere for remote access.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble when deploying the app - especially with virtual environment and versions. But with a little internet magic, we managed to successfully deploy it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how much we managed to do in this short period of a time. We started from scratch and made everything ourselves. As beginners, it felt like a huge accomplishment.

What we learned

Sometimes, it is better to stop and evaluate where you are going and plan everything properly before touching the keyboard to code - it makes working on a project much easier.

What's next for PgyBnk

In a tight time constraint, there was only a limited number of features we could implement. However, while brainstorming, we came up with multiple useful and quality of life features that we plan to add to the app - to scale it and give more people the access to use PgyBnk in accordance with their needs.

• The ability for a child to request a withdrawal from within the app instead of doing it outside. • Add mini-events based on parent/guardian preference. For example, an event could be a mini quiz with 10 questions about finance and a parent/guardian can assign a reward based on whether the child can answer n number of questions correctly. • Age-based financial complexity feature addition. For example, when a child turns 15, give them the option to invest a certain amount with a certain interest rate or extend a credit line which necessarily has to be paid for approval of any further withdrawal requests.