Learn2Earn

Crowd-fund your way to mastering the stock market!

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We are submitting Learn2Earn for the Prize categories: Video games, Social good, and Student life, and the IEX challenge.

Inspiration

  • Everybody winds up with spare change sometimes - what if you could combine that with your friends' spare change and learn to invest in the stock market for fun and profit?
  • We set out to make a site/app that would allow normal folks (like college students) to contribute to a pot of money that can be used to purchase shares of small company stocks, without losing half of your investment to transaction fees.
  • Combining your funds with others means there is less risk for you as an investor too. And through these trades you could learn how to navigate the stock market, and hopefully have some fun at the same time.

What it does

  • This is an app/site that will allow the user to connect with friends that might want to combine funds with them (through services like Venmo and Paypal), and to use that bigger pot of money to purchase stocks and watch it grow in value.
  • There are multiple pages that are filled in by the user, so it is very customizable and will show them new stocks to trade from companies that align with their interests.
  • We've made a Stock Dashboard that's a landing site where financial data for the stocks of interest will be consolidated, and it calculates the profit for each individual contribution to the money pot.
  • There are even motivating badges and points to help keep you motivated to watch your money grow.
  • So chip in some extra cash with some friends and lets get you INVESTING!

How we built it

  • We used the Glide app, which runs off of Google spreadsheets, to make various pages and data tables that can be edited by the user to customize their experience.
  • There are links and buttons that connect pages to help the user navigate the site. This will also help them gather their friends for the collaboration easier too.
  • Then for our example user (Jen Wa), who has picked a vaccine company VXRT (Vaxart Inc) to invest in, the app shows them the profits both for the entire pot of money, but also for each individual's contribution.
  • The stock data is collected from IEX-Cloud and consolidated into tables that we can use to build pages within the app, and will have a price tracking view that will help you learn about the ins and outs of the stock market.
  • There's a search function that allows the user to select types of companies (ie industry sector like Apple would be in the Electronics category), that we can grab info on and show the user some new stocks to check out for trades in the future.

Challenges we ran into

  • We went through a few ideas before settling on this one after talking to a hackathon mentor about the projects and the ones with the best hook/novelty.
  • We had not dealt with financial data before, so figuring out what the collected data was describing took some heavy concentration
  • While some of the User Inputs were able to be integrated into the app (like for the Friends/Collaborators, list of Interests, Amount of Contribution), there were some data visualization aspects that we were not able to complete in the time frame.
  • Making an interactive data visualization page in the app will have to be at a later date, but we do have a static example of what that might look like.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Making a strong/informative mockup to what we want the eventual finished app to do
  • Tackling new types of data and combining different programming methods/languages
  • Making stronger connections between the data sources and the buttons and tabs of the Glide app
  • Very proud of the line: "Put your money where your heart is!"

What we learned

  • More about how to use Glide to connect different data tables to lead the user through a pleasant experience in the app
  • How to visualize and assess financial data outputs that we had not seen before

What's next for Learn2Earn

  • Deeper integration of the Search function for Stocks to Watch
  • Tying the app to Venmo or Paypal to actually be able to transfer funds and purchase stocks
  • Coordinating the info from the stock information pages into the Dashboard, according to the users interests
  • Better integration of the reward system, including badges, points, credits, and prizes so the game tools help keep us motivated
  • A closer-to-absolutely-functional app that helps you learn to earn!

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Updates

posted an update —

We have the basic mockup of the app made in Glide and connected all of the pages with their spreadsheets so it shows the user entered inputs and links one page to the other. I'm learning a lot about all of the other things Glide can do. The only problem I have with it is that you can't have two people viewing/editing the app at the same time, so if someone is looking at it, and you hop on, you wind up kicking them out.

We have a draft of the presentation for the demo video, and once I get the last pieces of data collected into the app, I can make the app demo portion of the video. Hope yinz like it!

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