DragonHacks 2019
DragonHacks 2019
Participant
April 2019
About DragonHacks
- DragonHacks is Drexel University’s 24 hour hardware-focused hackathon event hosted by Drexel University IEEE in 2019 in the Bossone Research Enterprise Center. DragonHacks 2019 is bringing in the brightest minds of the world’s best schools to spend 24 hours to create ground breaking new products from scratch
My Team
- My team consisted of three members, whose majors are all MIS. We are the only team having MIS and business background while other teams have members with Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Hardware Engineering backgrounds.
- I was the only female in my team, and I led the coding part of our team by identifying the plan, listing out possible steps and resources, and distributing the tasks to my team members.
Our project – Visual Finance
| Please click here to see the demo video of our app! |
- Our plan: Since we are all business majors, we came up with Visual Finance, an interactive BI data visualization tool to illustrate the comparison between companies’ financial performance over a period of time. The theme is Retro Gaming, so we decided to go with financial dataset of top gaming companies over a period of 10 years.
- Why did we came up with this idea? Getting financial data of companies within a specific industry is a long process that involves many steps. People usually have to search for the names of industry leaders, find their financial data separately, and then compare them. This BI tool helps people save time on getting and understanding the financial performance of companies within the industry efficiently and effectively. This for anybody who wishes to get a good financial picture of a company over a period of time or comparison between the two companies in a simple, clear fashion.
- What we did during this 24-hour period? Our goal was to collect financial data from various sources about companies and used JavaScript and other J.S. libraries to visualize the financial information we found to tell a story to the viewer. Currently, our database focuses on the gaming industry across the world. We aimed to develop the foundation of the code so that we can add more financial data into our database.
- How about future improvements? We want to develop a website with a public domain in order to allow free-access to Internet users, including the implementation of Yahoo Finance API to get real-time financial data and using web scraping method to get a bigger database of companies names. We will also add more chart types to be able to manipulate the data with different visualization. Additionally, we will add “Save” and “Download” buttons so users can get the reports after browsing the website.
I was so focused on developing the app that I didn’t know my teammates had left to get me food and drink!
Key takeaways!
- Tools and Resources I used: Tools: Excel, GitHub, Javascript, jQuery, and Bootstrap.
- What I learned:
- Converted large dataset to JSON arrays
- Used Javascript to manipulate arrays as objects
- Applied Push() method to create different data lines in one graph
- Utilized jQuery and Bootstrap framework to design responsive website
- Final thoughts:
- It was a great exposure for me to apply lessons I learned in MIS classes to practical use. I got a chance to make new friends having different majors and mindset, exploring Drexel University’s campus, learning from other teams’ projects, having fun with coding, and spending time with my friends!
