CityUHK students transform social media into an award-winning learning tool in AI Hackathon
Students from City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) recently achieved outstanding results at the artificial intelligence (AI) hackathon, Hack The East 2026. Their innovative project, StudyRot, stood out among numerous competing teams and earned the OAX Foundation Award, demonstrating CityUHK students’ creativity and technical prowess in applying AI to real-life scenarios.
HackTheEast 2026 was a completely student led hackathon that brought together student teams from universities across Hong Kong. Centred on the theme “Applied Artificial Intelligence in EdTech and FinTech”, participants were challenged to develop creative and practical solutions within a 24-hour timeframe. The event was supported by prominent industry names, including Ingram Micro Hong Kong & AWS, ExpressVPN, MiniMax, OAX Foundation and Abelian, adding significant industry recognition to the competition.
The award-winning team, comprising six students from CityUHK’s Department of Computer Science, designed StudyRot in response to the common challenge of short attention spans among students during learning. By leveraging AI, the project transforms traditional course materials into interactive, social media-style content. Students simply upload lecture slides, notes or study materials, and the system generates discussion-based content resembling social media feeds, incorporating pop culture references and internet language to enhance engagement and learning motivation.
Ryan Dyson Darmawan, a Year 3 student in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the award-winning team, explained the project’s concept. He noted that social media is often seen as a major factor distracting students from their studies, leading many to attempt to solve the problem by restricting its use. Instead, the team chose to take a reverse thinking approach, harnessing the appeal of social media and transforming it into a tool that supports learning, offering an innovative response to the challenges new technologies pose to education.
The team noted that the greatest challenge of the competition was developing a minimum viable product within just 24-hours. This required learning unfamiliar technologies in a short time and required a high level of teamwork and coordination. While the process was demanding, they described it as a valuable learning experience that further deepened their interest in artificial intelligence and innovation, and inspired them to apply technology to solve real world problems in the future.
The judging panel praised StudyRot for its simplicity and effectiveness in addressing a key learning pain point, noting that it offered greater practical value than some over-engineered solutions. Judges from the OAX Foundation also commended the team’s mature thinking and system architecture and were particularly impressed with the technical design of their web application.
Shreya Gurung, a member of the organising team and a Year 4 student in Global Operations Management in the Department of Decision Analytics and Operations at CityUHK, stated that the event’s original goal was to establish a hackathon focused on technology and utility, encouraging participants to focus on hands-on development and engineering practice rather than presentation slides or conceptual designs.
She added, “As a group of students passionate about technology development and innovation, we wanted to build a student-led competition platform that emphasises real world building. By allowing participants to fully immerse themselves in coding and innovation within a 24-hour timeframe, we wanted them to respond to real world challenges through functional, working prototypes.” She noted that seeing participating teams, including her CityUHK peers, stand out through creativity and technical excellence fully reflects the original vision behind organising the event.
CityUHK is committed to fostering innovation and embracing the new era of AI, leading global trends in academic research and technological development. In recent years, the University established the Hong Kong Institute of AI for Science and the Institute of Future Learning to drive interdisciplinary research and the application of AI and innovative technologies. Furthermore, CityUHK has continued to expand partnerships with various tech enterprises to provide more AI-related learning and practical opportunities for its faculty and students.
