## Activity type
Personal pursuit (eg Art / Computing / Making / Music / Drama / Sport)
## Description
Participate in a 36-hour hackathon (HackMIT Shenzhen, hosted at CUHK Shenzhen) under the Healthcare track, building SHELTER — a mental health support web app for Gen Z users facing academic and emotional pressure.
After original teammates could not be located on-site, form an impromptu team of three with two art-background friends and begin development with near-zero sleep across the full 36 hours. Draw on prior collaboration experience to divide responsibilities efficiently: handle full-stack architecture and AI integration while teammates lead visual design inspired by a space-station aesthetic — a private environment where users can step away from external pressure.
For the first time, integrate AI into a project by designing two distinct AI characters, each assigned its own role and toolset. The primary AI companion listens to user concerns, performs emotion analysis, and dispatches a secondary task-decomposition agent to break goals into actionable steps. Both agents are built on DeepSeek APIs with a custom agent framework; the task agent, with user consent, directly modifies the on-screen task list in real time. Build the front end in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with a Python back end; integrate white-noise playback, a flame-animation focus timer, and a time-statistics dashboard.
Develop a personal engineering practice during the sprint: prototype each sub-feature as an isolated algorithm demo, verify its logic independently, then integrate it into the main codebase — reducing debugging time and keeping the project on schedule under extreme time pressure.
Ship a functional, visually polished product within the deadline, demonstrating that a small cross-discipline team can combine strong design sensibility with AI-driven functionality to address a real mental-health gap.
## Skills
– [x] Critical thinking
– [x] Planning
– [ ] Artistic skills
– [x] Communication
– [x] Teamwork
– [ ] Leadership
– [x] Problem solving
– [x] Creativity / Innovation
– [x] Independence
– [x] Adaptability / Resilience
– [x] Risk-taking / Courage
– [x] Inquisitiveness
## Date started
Month: 3
Year: 2026
## Date finished
Month: 3
Year: 2026