Immigrace | Devpost

Inspiration

Home ownership is a milestone towards achieving the "American Dream". It symbolizes autonomy, achievement, and national pride. But it's not just a dream for U.S. born citizens, it's also the dream my immigrant parents have and many who arrive here from other countries.

However, immigrants are facing more barriers than ever before to accessing quality affordable housing.

When my parents went through the homebuying process, they encountered challenge after challenge. The information was so technical and hard to understand because English isn't our first language, and the process was confusing. We ended up paying more than we thought we would’ve, and we didn’t quite know why. Of course, it doesn't have to be this way.

What it does

Our team spent the weekend creating an interactive web app that helps immigrants prepare to buy a home, determine whether they can afford one, and understand the process in a culturally sensitive way.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front end, D3 for the data science modeling visualization, Python, Django and Flask for leveraging a machine learning model to predict outcomes.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were implementing the loan prediction model into the web app. While we learned a lot about Django and Flask, we ultimately ran out of time. We also could not figure out how to output the data from data visualization in a tooltip. We could console.log it, though(!).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A majority of our team (3!) was participating in our first Hackathon, and we successfully worked together as a hybrid team.

What we learned

We pushed ourselves to learn something new, depending on what level we're at. For the UI/UX designer, we worked with a mentor to realize some visual designs via code. For the back end developer, we implemented one of first machine learning models. For the more experienced coder, we started using D3 for data visualization.

What's next for Immigrace

In the future, we hope to expand the number of languages we support, implement an interactive quiz, and provide more resources immigrants can look to in their housing search.