SJTU School of Design Hauls in Awards at Mobile Application Competition
Students and faculty from the Department of Design, School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University achieved excellent results in the 10th “China Collegiate Computing Competition – Mobile Application Innovation Contest (MAIC).”
The project FoodHub won First Prize in the Qidi Track (启迪赛道), Drawing & Dream Lab (《绘玩造梦坊》) won Second Prize in the Qidi Track, and Whisper and SlowMo (《SlowMo 慢动作》) were awarded Third Prize in the Qidi Track. Faculty members Han Ting, Liu Bo and Dong Zhanxun received the “Outstanding Supervisor Award”, and Dong Zhanxun was further honored with the “Ten-Year Outstanding Contribution Award”.
The competition attracted 3,625 teams from nearly 1,000 universities across China, all competing for top honors in mobile application innovation. Over the past decade, the competition has engaged more than 700,000 students and faculty members from over a thousand universities in all provinces nationwide, and has become an important platform for showcasing creativity and innovation in computing education.
First Prize
FoodHub
Second Prize
Drawing & Dream Lab (《绘玩造梦坊》)
Third Prize
SlowMo (《SlowMo 慢动作》)
Whisper
First Prize
FoodHub
Student team: Yessy Liana Putri (Indonesia), Zhou Hexiang
Supervisor: Dong Zhanxun
FoodHub is a mobile application designed to help international residents in China overcome the language and information barriers they face when trying to understand and order Chinese food. While Chinese cuisine is famously rich in variety and cultural depth, many non-Chinese speakers struggle with unfamiliar dish names, the uncertainty of what they are ordering, and the difficulty of communicating in restaurants. FoodHub combines translation, learning, recommendation and social functions to lower that barrier. The app builds and continuously updates a large catalogue of traditional Chinese dishes, presenting each entry through multimedia content that explains ingredients, flavor profiles and cultural background, giving users space to freely learn and explore. By scanning a menu, users can quickly jump from a dish name to a detailed “food map” and understand what they are about to order, making the ordering process easier and more enjoyable. They can bookmark their favorite dishes, “check in” to record each tasting experience, write down impressions, and gradually form a visual record of their personal food journey, which in turn encourages continued exploration. With its sharing and interaction features, FoodHub also allows users to post dining experiences and connect with other food lovers, turning Chinese cuisine into a medium for cross-cultural communication and social interaction.
Student team: Ding Yijun, Shi Huilin
Supervisor: Dong Zhanxun
Drawing & Dream Lab is a platform that uses AI technology to support independent picture-book creation and sharing for children aged 7 to 10. Unlike traditional, often tedious story-writing exercises, or many AI content tools that rely on “one-click generation” that excises the user’s independent thought, this platform puts children in the role of director of their own stories. Children can photograph their own drawings or everyday objects and use them as visual elements to build scenes. Through arranging these images, imagining plots and composing pages, they create storybooks that truly belong to them. Characters appearing in one page’s illustrations can be reused as collage materials in later pages, helping children extend their narratives and construct a consistent story world. The finished works can be exported as videos and shared with family and friends, allowing the creative process to have a visible outcome. In this way, children’s creativity, logical thinking and expressive abilities are nurtured through self-directed making rather than passive consumption, and they experience growth while enjoying the act of creation.
Whisper
Student team: Wang Pei, Gan Si Hua (Malaysia), Yuki Neo Wei Qian (Singapore)
Supervisor: Han Ting
Whisper is a health-related interaction concept built around the idea that “Action is confirmation.” Instead of asking the user to constantly click, confirm or manually log what they have already done, Whisper treats real physical actions as the moment of confirmation and records them directly. This rethinks the common pattern of medication reminder apps, which usually depend on notifications plus manual confirmation; even when the user has taken the medicine, they still need an extra operation, adding friction and cognitive burden. Whisper is designed to sense the user’s rhythms more proactively and embed logging and reminders into daily life in a quieter, more seamless way. On Apple Watch, it shifts the role of the device from a simple reminder sender to a system that tries to “understand” the user’s behavior, turning external interruption into subtle companionship. The goal is to create a more natural and trustworthy experience for everyday health management, and to introduce a more human-centered, forward-looking interaction mode into the Apple ecosystem.
SlowMo (SlowMo 慢动作)
Student: Zhang Liuxin
Supervisor: Liu Bo
SlowMo is a health management app designed for people living with chronic fatigue. It combines activity pacing strategies with a light, game-like experience, turning long-term self-management into a process that feels less like a burden and more like a gentle journey. The app includes accessible educational content that explains chronic fatigue and reasonable activity patterns, and it allows users to record and monitor their activities over time so they can better align their daily routines with their physical limits. A system of achievements and progress feedback is presented with cute animations that visualize improvement, offering encouragement rather than pressure and accompanying users as they progress step by step.
