# Fund With Passion - AngelHack 2019 AWS Challenge Winner ##### Members: Melodies Sim, Neo Yu Yao Terence, Ruhani Suri，Li Senrui, Lim Yiying Eloise --- ### Us! ![](https://i.imgur.com/RxJa4pK.jpg) ### Why did you join this Hackathon? ***Melodies***: There was actually a really interesting story behind how we formed this team. Ruhani and I were actually planning to join as a duo but we got introduced to Terence by a mutual friend, who invited Eloise who then invited Senrui. Woah, that was really a mouthful. ***Terence***: As it is the school holidays now, I had some spare time was looking for hackathons to participate in. I had also wanted to experience a well-orgniased hackathon. AngelHack being an international hackathon organised in close to 30 different countries each year by the same group of organisers caught my attention. It's also cool how our team is a really diverse team, formed from members across different years, schools and nationalities! ***Ruhani***: It is amazing how most of us didn't directly know each other before the hackathon! We all were introduced through mutual friends and shared a common passion for building something and making the most out of this hackathon. We heard of Angel Hack through friends and online announcements, and were lukcy enough to find such a diverse team of like-minded and talented individuals to work with! ***Senrui***：I went to AngelHack in 2018 with another group of friends, and we had fun times although we did not really win the challenges. This time it was also invited by my friend Eloise, who came together with another group of schoolmates from her university. Seeing a well mix of interests, majors each of us is studying, and even the educational background we had, I feel that this would be another amazing hackathon with ideas emerging from various aspects of life. ***Eloise***: I joined this hackathon to get free AWS credits from participating and to win! I really like the AWS prize. ### Why did you choose the AWS challenge? ***Terence***: The requirements of the AWS challenge is to build a mobile or web application that connects to at least one AWS service. We felt that web dev is an easily transferable skill- a universal medium to showcase our ideas and hence picking up AWS will be really beneficial for us even beyond this hackathon. I believe that this sentiment is shared by many others participating in this hackathon which resulted in almost every single group entering their projects for the AWS challenge as well, causing it to be the most competitive challenge in AngelHack 2019. I am really glad that we won despite this. ***Ruhani***: When we read though the problem statements, we shortlisted the challenges we wish to participate in by 1) our passion to pursue the technology and the problem statement and 2) our existing knowledge of the same and the gap we need to bridge between now and the submission deadline. Based on these criteria, AWS challenges seemed the most fit as some of us had webdev experience and others had the drive to pick it up! ***Eloise***: The prize is great! AWS provides services for a broad range of applications. The AWS credits will be very useful for me to build anything I want. The keyboard is so pretty too. I am really glad that my group decided to work on the AWS challenge in the end so we have the chance to obtain the REALLY REALLY A-M-AZ-I-N-GGGGGG AWS prize. ***Melodies***: Same! Personally, I use AWS services to deploy my websites and am also recently trying to build serverless applications, thus the AWS Challenge awards were particularly attractive to me :) ### How did you come up with the idea? ***Melodies***: Disaster victims often spend years recovering the aftermath and require large sums of money to rebuilt their houses and regain their health. We have also observed that the victims that are the most heavily affected often come from countries with less developed infrastructure and social support. Despite the presence of various traditional crowdfunding platforms, disaster victims every year are still lacking the financial support they need. One problem we have identified is that traditional crowdfunding often showcase graphic and negative images that may deter the normal user from staying on the platform long enough to understand the problems that victims are facing, and thus be compelled to help and donate. Another problem we have observed is that not many people are familiar with crowdfunding platforms for disaster victims. For example, many people we have interviewed from the hackathon have not know of these platforms. This has motivated us to come up with Fund With Passion, a new way to portray disaster crowdfunding in a positive light as giving these victims a new ray of hope. Our vision is to introduce a greater target audience for crowdfunding for disaster victims while creating a platform can sustain interest and bring about awareness to the prevalent problem of disaster recovery. ***Ruhani***: After hundreds of messages exchanged on the group chat just the night before the hackathon, we had shortlisted the problem statement that we wished to work on, which was that of aiding the disaster victims. From that, most of the ideation was done on the hackathon day itself, coming up with the UI boilerplate, to coming up with the basic work flow of the webapp to the main ingredient, the game. The idea of gamifying this donation process was not only to make it interesting for the donors, but also more lucrative! ***Senrui***: In the beginning, due to the different backgrounds that we had previously, literally each of us had our own idea about this hackathon. It ranged from blockchain to machine learning and then to IoT projects. However, after each of us describing their approach of their proposed ideas, we have found out that this idea of establishing a funding platform prototype with gamified donation processes are the most confident idea with the maximum amount of work that each of us was able to do. In this way, we ended up crafting our ideas right when the hackathon started on Saturday. ### How was your experience at the Hackathon? ***Terence***: The organisers were really fun people and the mentors were extremely helpful! I especially liked how there was a huge turn up at this hackathon and how there were so many quality projects submitted - a great learning opportunity! I am also really thankful for this opportunity to work with such brillant teammates for this project! ***Ruhani***: Honestly, I have been to couple of hackathons now, still I found my experience here to be very unique. The location was very spacious, the participants where rich in talent and ideas and the hosts were amazing! Would definitely come again :) ***Senrui***: Since this was the second time joining AngelHack, I was having very high expectations about this hackathon and it really became another exciting hackathon experience. The organizers were really friendly and helpful, and were here in the campus nearly all the time for any assistance needed. Not only the environment was conducive, the other teams were really nice people, too. Teams there were really friendly to talk to us, and that's how an enjoyable hackathon feels like. ***Eloise***: Awesome! Compared to other hackathons i've been to, this hackathon had the best nightlife! We had delicious pizza for supper and entertaining games at night. Also, as a person who does not sleep during hackathons, I am really glad that this hackathon remained vibrant through the night. There was always someone whom I could chat to and have fun with when I felt lonely or bored with coding. ### What are some of your key takeaways? How did this experience impact you and your team? ***Melodies***: Through this hackathon, I have the unique experience of working with teammates of different backgrounds. When we were discussing I was often enlightened by the diverse perspectives that were given. ***Terence***: Being really new to web dev, I learned that nothing is too difficult; it is possible to produce a working product from scratch in just under 24 hours. ***Ruhani***: We all picked up rapid prototyping of webapps as well as webdev in specific, along with other skills such as team work and sleeplessness! My best takeaway was the pitch for sure! Having to pitch in front of a room full of geniuses as well as being cross-questioned by the esteemed judges from the industory itself was a great learning opportunity that I am so glad to have received! ***Senrui***: Not to mention all the related skills of frontend developing acquired for me over the 24 hours, the most important takeaway from this cooperation was the importance of setting a good target and trying to make it come true. A good target is not something big or really fanciful as it claims, but something that is really up to the claims and can even exceed it. Without a good target set before this, we could not win the hackation at all. ***Eloise***: I think the biggest takeaway is the friendship i've forged with Ruhani and Melodies and closer ties with Terence and Senrui through the hackathon. I think we form a very good team! Thanks to them, I have picked up many webdev skills too. :) The second biggest takeaway is the prize. ### What is next for this idea, you and the team? ***Terence***: We are really thankful for this award, it is a great motivation for us to continue working on exciting projects that will benefit the community. ***Ruhani***: We are definitely thankful for the opportunity and the prize, and we look forward to taking part in more hackathons and learning new things. More than winning, it is the experience of building something one is passionate about and learning from other participants that matters the most in such events. If possible, we am definitely open to taking this idea forward to make it into something worthwhile! ***Senrui***: This idea was a novel approach to solving the issue of the lack of motivation to donation that is faced by many of the charities, including many of the local charities in Singapore. It would be amazing to see how this idea could potentially be developed into and how this idea could be perceived by our target audience. If possible, I am more than willing to make it come true and evolve it into a real working platform and being able to help many in need! ***Eloise***: We received many thoughtful comments on our project on hackathon.io. I would love to see this idea turn into reality but we will need to address these suggestions and concerns first before taking this idea forward. ***Melodies***: The idea of a gamified platform to bring about greater interest and awareness of a prevalent problem is something that I believe in. For me, I will definitely continue researching and brainstorming targeted ways to more increase awareness and donations for these victims.