On a recent weekend at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, while most students were thinking about sleep, two Guilford College students were thinking about everything else a student might need to survive college.

Assignments. Jobs. Lecture notes. Deadlines. Even the simple question no one remembers to ask themselves: Did you drink any water today?

Somewhere inside a 24-hour blur of keyboards, caffeine and maybe an hour of sleep, for a contest Wilmer Acevedo Quezada ’26 and Mo Mohammadi ’26 built an app that tried to do all of it.

Then they won.

The pair traveled to UNC Pembroke for a hackathon — a kind of coding marathon where students design and build a piece of technology in a single day. Teams competed in tracks focused on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and education.

Wilmer and Mo chose education.

It was Wilmer’s first hackathon.

“It was a good experience,” he says with a small laugh that suggests the understatement is intentional. A hackathon is an event whose contestants compete to innovate something new. The Pembroke hackathon invited AI projects in areas like education and health and cybersecurity. Mo and Wilmer chose to make an education-focused app.

Their app, called Aura, became an all-in-one digital assistant for students.

It can integrate with learning platforms like Canvas to pull in assignments and deadlines. Artificial intelligence can then break those assignments down into steps – what to read, what to write, what to finish first. “We wanted to build an app that did everything,” says Mo.

The app even searches for YouTube for course tutorials. It records lectures and turns them into transcripts, flashcards and study prompts. It gathers job listings and professional news in a student’s field.

If a computer science student wants the latest industry headlines, Aura can pull them in and even read them aloud while the student walks across campus.

“There was also a way to connect with other people in your major or career field,” Wilmer says. “So you could kind of build a network.”

The app even keeps an eye on the student behind the screen.

Mo helped design a wellness feature that tracks how long a user is working and measures how long assignments typically take.

If the system notices something unusual — long stretches of inactivity or work that seems unusually slow — it will gently ask a question many college students rarely hear from software.

“Are you okay?” Mo says. “Do you need a break?”

The idea for the app, says Mo, came together the way many good ideas do: over dinner.

Participants arrived, listened to the competition tracks, collected meal vouchers and scattered across campus to start brainstorming. Wilmer and Mo sat down together and began tossing ideas back and forth.

“We didn’t really have a plan before we got there,” Mo says. “We just started adding things and adding things.”

Soon the list of features grew long enough to make most developers nervous. That was part of the appeal.

Inside a classroom they claimed as their workspace, Mo and Wilmer teamed up with two freshmen from UNC Pembroke. For the next 24 hours they wrote code, integrated outside software services, wrestled with complicated application programming interfaces and slowly watched the idea come alive.

By the end of the event the judges agreed. Aura took the top prize: two iPad Airs and a win that meant more than the hardware.

Wilmer, like Mo, a Cyber and Network Security major, says hackathons are less about trophies than momentum.

“You learn a lot,” he says. “You meet people. You learn new tools and new software you might use in your career.”

Mo, who works at Guilford’s ITS Help Desk, agrees. And he’s not finished.

He recently won another small hackathon at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“I just want to keep learning,” he says.

Which, if you think about it, is exactly what their app was designed to do.