Empower Hacks Hackathon Submission

‣ Main Idea: Web application that facilitates lending/borrowing & selling/purchasing of second-hand low-priced course textbooks (or free if borrowing) amongst students, with some unique elements (involving gift cards, tracking analytics and more), to promote:

• Learning for academic success, unburdened by financial concerns
  
• A sense of belonging and community among low income students
  
• Resource sharing
  
• Initiative to help by creating incentives such as an opportunity for senior low income students to receive gift cards to purchase food, clothes and supplies by increasing their 'rank'
  
• Reduction in the opportunity and time costs of finding cost-effective and budget-friendly books and lack of availability in libraries or platforms
  
• And most importantly, help low income students feel valued in the community and have the ability to contribute
  
• Reusing textbooks and reducing waste (also lowering printing costs)
  

Note: In addition to first generation low income college students, the project created has been extended to low income school students as well.

‣ See Devpost project page for more details (including future implications, user guide, inspiration and more)

‣ The prompt was

"Create software that addresses an issue in first generation low income students such as: financial planning, career opportunities, mental health, community building, or an issue found in your community."

‣ Video Demo and Pitch: Click on the image below to find a pitch and video demo of the project:

‣ To run the application on your device:

• Install DB Browser for SQLite to find saved user signup information (rename the database file in the code if you prefer)
• Input the following commands on your terminal (once you create a directory [mkdir] at a location of your choice and are in your newly created directory [cd new_directory_name])

git clone https://github.com/V-Mayya/Resale-Revolution

Once you are in the repository folder ("Resale-Revolution", using cd), run the following command:

streamlit run empower_hacks_code.py 

Note: Due to the time-constrained nature under which the software was built, there are several ways to improve the code structure, security, resolution of errors, and exception handling. I will work on improving these features in the future.

‣ Find the code here.

‣ Further questions on project background: