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Case study · 04 · Product collaboration

AI College Budgeting System

A hackathon-built budgeting website that helps students match a school to their finances — designed with generative AI and design thinking at the U.S. Bank + Code Savvy AI Challenge. Try the interactive version below.

Try the idea

Answer four questions, get a school.

A working recreation of the questionnaire flow we designed at the hackathon. Pick a field of study and degree type, enter what you can spend per semester, and the site recommends the best-rated U.S. college that fits, plus other options to compare — using estimated tuition for demonstration purposes, not real quotes.

What I did

A common money problem, turned into a tool.

The hackathon challenge was to design a creative tech solution to a financial situation people face every day. Our team picked one every student knows: figuring out which college you can actually afford. I helped design and build a responsive website that asks a student a few simple questions and recommends a school that fits their budget.

  • Collaborated with a team at the U.S. Bank + Code Savvy AI Challenge, a half-day hackathon focused on generative AI and design thinking.
  • Designed a responsive budgeting website that helps college students plan for a common financial situation: choosing a school they can actually afford.
  • Built the questionnaire flow — field of study, budget per semester, and degree type — with input validation to keep the data clean.
  • Collected and structured user responses so the site could generate a sensible school recommendation from the answers.

The event

U.S. Bank + Code Savvy AI Challenge

A half-day hackathon about learning generative AI and design thinking by doing. Participants got hands-on experience using AI to design a creative tech solution to a common financial situation faced by people every day — spending the day learning how generative AI and design thinking combine to brainstorm and build innovative solutions.

Our answer was the College Budgeting System: a website where a student describes their situation in three inputs and gets a school recommendation they can act on.

Event

U.S. Bank + Code Savvy AI Challenge · Half-day AI hackathon

Focus

Generative AI + design thinking applied to college budgeting

My role

Responsive website · Questionnaire design · Input validation · Data collection

Built with

HTML · CSS · JavaScript

Skills applied

HTMLCSSJavaScriptInput validationQuestionnaire designData collectionResponsive designDesign thinking

Keep exploring

From hackathons to case studies — I like turning messy questions into working tools.