Hack&Roll 2026
On 17 and 18 Jan 2026, Chen-Yi, Xizhen and I participated in Hack&Roll, Singapore’s largest student-run hackathon organised by NUS Hackers.
Our idea
I have a question is a study assistant - used when you just want to slack in class. Maybe you’re gaming, coding, sleeping or doing something else - I have a question covers all the listening for you.
Key features
- Answer generation: listens to your teacher and generates responses to questions whenever one is asked. You can read the response aloud or use the built-in text to speech to read for you!
- Question generation: Generates relevant questions so you can pretend you’re engaged and farm participation points!
- Notes generation: Summarises the audio transcriptions and saves them as Markdown to be easily exported to other platforms like Notion and Obsidian
- Sleep detection: Detects when you’re sleeping in class and wakes you up if you sleep for too long or when a question is asked
My contributions
I worked on implementing real-time audio transcription using the ElevenLabs API (thanks to the organisers for free creds!). I played around with the API and got voice cloning to work too. I made use of Mediapipe to implement the sleep detection, which calculates the Eye Aspect Ratio (EAR) and sets a threshold to detect if the user is sleeping. Finally, I added the “related resources” feature to find links for relevant articles or posts based on the audio transcription.
The Experience
Hack&Roll 2026 was an eye-opening experience for me as I had not attended a physical hackathon before.
It was really enjoyable vibe-coding improvements in the middle of the night and the free coffee was really good (kept me awake the whole night).
The free OpenAI and ElevenLabs creds were a huge bonus, and I still had $100 of unused OpenAI creds after the hackathon.
Most importantly, we had lots of fun discussing features, getting ragebaited by Claude/Codex when the code wouldn’t run and ragebaiting each other, especially over Chen-Yi’s obsession with B2B SaaS UI designs.
What I’ve learnt
- Vibe-coding is really powerful - it’s very possible to build something functional in the 24 hours.
- Vibing is great for prototyping and testing out features - saves a lot of time as we can still test integrating frontend and backend while someone is working on the frontend
- Of course, human expertise was still needed for more creative aspects like our UI and we had to make manual changes even with the LLM-generated code
- Go for hackathons for free food and merch (+3 t-shirts!!)
- Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite is really fast and decently accurate - I’m using it for I have a question and also Graili, my Holy Grail scraper project.
Conclusion
Hack&Roll 2026 was truly a enjoyable first hackathon experience and I look forward to joining future iterations of Hack&Roll (maybe win) and other hackathons.
Hack&Roll 2026
