## Inspiration/What it Does

Kiva is a nonprofit organization that allows anyone to provide micro loans. We wanted to help loaners quantify the impact of their loans in the community of which they are loaning to.

## How I built it

Kiva Impact uses data points from World Bank and United Nations to determine the power of a loan, the importance of the loan (in terms of impact to GNI), and social implications that surround the loan.

## What's next for Kiva Impact

We hope to improve our impact calculator by creating models using historical data. By using machine learning, our algorithm will be able to determine why an impact score was assigned. We also want to improve our data visualization by using more D3 models. In the future, we can use a prediction method to estimate the potential impact of an unfunded project. We can then tell loaners where their money may have the greatest impact before they even issue the loan.
## Inspiration

In today's age, people have become more and more divisive on their opinions. We've found that discussion nowadays can just result in people shouting instead of trying to understand each other.

## What it does

**Change my Mind** helps to alleviate this problem. Our app is designed to help you find people to discuss a variety of different topics. They can range from silly scenarios to more serious situations. (Eg. Is a Hot Dog a sandwich? Is mass surveillance needed?)

Once you've picked a topic and your opinion of it, you'll be matched with a user with the opposing opinion and put into a chat room. You'll have 10 mins to chat with this person and hopefully discover your similarities and differences in perspective.

After the chat is over, you ask you to rate the maturity level of the person you interacted with. This metric allows us to increase the success rate of future discussions as both users matched will have reputations for maturity.

## How we built it

**Tech Stack**

* Front-end/UI
	+ Flutter and dart
	+ Adobe XD
* Backend
	+ Firebase
		- Cloud Firestore
		- Cloud Storage
		- Firebase Authentication

**Details**

* Front end was built after developing UI mockups/designs
* Heavy use of advanced widgets and animations throughout the app
* Creation of multiple widgets that are reused around the app
* Backend uses gmail authentication with firebase.
* Topics for debate are uploaded using node.js to cloud firestore and are displayed in the app using specific firebase packages.
* Images are stored in firebase storage to keep the source files together.

## Challenges we ran into

* Initially connecting Firebase to the front-end
* Managing state while implementing multiple complicated animations
* Designing backend and mapping users with each other and allowing them to chat.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* The user interface we made and animations on the screens
* Sign up and login using Firebase Authentication
* Saving user info into Firestore and storing images in Firebase storage
* Creation of beautiful widgets.

## What we're learned

* Deeper dive into State Management in flutter
* How to make UI/UX with fonts and colour palates
* Learned how to use Cloud functions in Google Cloud Platform
* Built on top of our knowledge of Firestore.

## What's next for Change My Mind

* More topics and User settings
* Implementing ML to match users based on maturity and other metrics
* Potential Monetization of the app, premium analysis on user conversations
* Clean up the Coooooode! Better implementation of state management specifically implementation of provide or BLOC.
## Inspiration

After reading a study that stated $62 million in pennies are accidentally thrown out each year, we were curious about how this money could have instead been used to benefit society. As such, we decided to create an app that allows users to use their leftover change to make an actual change for others.

## What it does

change4change promotes charitable contributions through each of your purchases. All your transactions are rounded to the nearest dollar, with the difference going towards a charity of your choice. In case you’re uncertain of which charity to support, the app has built-in search capabilities that allow you to either search for charities by name or by category.

## How we built it

Through Android Studio, Google Firebase, and the CapitalOne Hackathon API, we created our functional mobile app. Firebase provided a secure database for storing user credentials, while the CapitalOne Hackathon API enabled easy access to banking simulations to power our features. Android’s handy native UI elements allows us to create a sleek front-end to present to the user.

## Challenges we ran into

As first-time developers on Android, we spent some time learning to work within the platform’s limitations. Obtaining a database of charities was also a challenge which we solved by scraping websites and processing data using custom python scripts to generate the database. Another challenge was configuring Firebase for Android to allow for authorization and data-storing.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our app’s functionalities since they are modularized and well-designed; as such, user experience is streamlined and simple. Additionally, we are satisfied with having developed a pragmatic charity search functionality by applying data science concepts and overcoming certain Android limitations. Additionally, we are happy with our ability to develop a sleek interface design that is appealing to users.

## What we learned

Since many of us were new to Android development, we learnt the fundamentals of Android Studio and Java. Additionally, we had to learn how to use Firebase to authenticate user credentials and store user information securely.

## What's next for change4change

We plan on implementing functionality for real banking institutions and potentially releasing this product to the Google Play Store. Additionally, we are looking into possibly rebuilding the app to be more scalable for larger operations.