Building cREDit at HackNotts24

Last week I had the pleasure of taking part in HackNotts24, my first hackathon ever. After years of telling myself I had no reason to visit one because I didn't have the right experience, I decided to go anyway. Together with my amazing team: Mohid, Yasmeen, and Yusuf, we were crowned the winners of the award by the team from Capital One. The competition was tough: there were 54 other teams formed of over 180 other hackers!

The brief was to design a product that enhanced the financial literacy of the layperson. Capital One specialise in offering credit products, so our role-playing game, cREDit, is geared towards exactly that.

In cREDit, you play as Luda, an accountant in Soviet Moscow (please excuse the egregious anachronism!). Your aim is to increase your reputation (modelled off real-world credit score algorithms) through the responsible use of various credit instruments. As you progress through the game, you will take out a credit card, a mortgage, 0% APR financing on your Lada (car), and more. Each decision you make is shown on the ledger on the left along with its impact on your reputation score.

Through careful design of the hyper-realistic financial model backend, and a playful but thematic UI, we were able to craft a completely unique experience through which the user gains an intuitive understanding of healthy credit/debt management and credit scoring.

I had a total blast creating this with my teammates. It was a real challenge from a technical and organisational standpoint and we could have only achieved this by playing to everyone's strengths. For me, that meant taking a more hands-off, project management role. My practice in design thinking and problem solving at Loughborough prepared me well for this - especially at the ideation and development stages. I was also involved in the game asset design. Nevertheless, in the final hours of development, I also got my hands dirty, digging deep into the backend to tie it into the frontend and carry out lots of debugging!

For anyone experiencing the same doubts I did while I had the chance to take part in hackathons at my own university: take the leap. You will only come out smarter and with a host of new contacts. While staying up all night did give me flashbacks to the days before submission at university, I was an unforgettable and immensely rewarding experience.

Thanks to the many HN24 volunteers, the University of Nottingham CS faculty, and the team at Capital One. Now, on to the next one... ;)

- Yuvraj

P.S. You can try cREDit here (you will need to install the requisite Python libraries).