Several promising ideas emerged during the competition, impressing the judges and highlighting the participants' passion as they utilized Zoom and AI to showcase compelling possibilities. After careful deliberation and a flurry of engaged questions from intrigued audience members, the Pitch Competition jury revealed their top picks:
Third place | Team: AI for Impact (Ansh Tiwari, Praise Ifetogun, Valerie Attah)
Career AI Companion helps students bridge the gap between academics and industry relevance for real-world success.
Amid the rapid expansion of AI tools and resources, students may feel overwhelmed and seek assistance navigating a career that aligns with their degree and is resilient against AI-driven job redundancies. The AI for Impact team proposes Zoom Career AI Companion as a solution. This tool helps students analyze the skills gained in their courses and identify market demands that align with their coursework. If a class is conducted via Zoom, Zoom AI will generate post-session documents outlining in-demand skills relevant to the course content. Additionally, Zoom’s GenAI Chat feature assists in drafting sample job interview responses incorporating the skills and experience acquired in students' courses.
Second place | Team: ThinkTank Twins (Advikaa Kapil, Tanav Jalan)
Breaking barriers, building bridges.
Over 1.3 billion people worldwide with visual impairments face academic challenges due to poorly designed digital interfaces. "AccessibilityAI" tackles these barriers with a real-time, AI-powered tool personalizing online learning. Enhancing Zoom’s AI Companion, AccessibilityAI delivers auditory and tactile notification cues, ensuring users never miss key updates like polls, chat messages, or off-screen annotations. A smart-focus tool adjusts content to the user’s visual range, while a focal length slider sharpens text and images. Haptic feedback devices augment visual elements, such as charts, maps and animations, into tactile experiences for immersive learning. Scalable, ethical, and inclusive, "AccessibilityAI" isn’t just an add-on, ThinkTank Twins argues — it’s essential for equitable education.
Champions of innovation: Stand-out team earns 1st place prize
The coveted first-place prize was given to Team F2 for “Jar-gone,” comprised of Shailee Shah, Ravichandran Rajappa, Shraddha Pandey, and Manya Dasari.
First place | Team: F2 (Manya Dasari, Ravichandran Rajappa, Shailee Shah, Shraddha Pandey)
Provide instant definitions and visuals, all without disrupting the flow of class.
Motivation to learn can transform into anxiety when students experience information overload and industry-specific jargon, creating barriers to understanding and engagement. Introducing Jar-gone: a gesture-based AI companion that helps students capture and clarify unfamiliar terms during Zoom classes. Students can flag jargon with a simple gesture or button press to receive instant definitions and visuals without disrupting the lecture. Professors also gain insights through analytics on commonly flagged terms to better support student learning.
Seamlessly integrating with Zoom’s AI, transcription, and cloud storage, Jar-gone is scalable for institutional use.
Jar-gone’s pitch exceeded expectations and captured the needs of learners navigating unfamiliar terminology as they aim to become experts in their chosen field of study.
"Special thanks to all the organizers and SMEs," said Shraddha. "They reinforced our belief in our idea and gave us very valuable inputs." Manya echoed Shraddha’s appreciation, stating, "The SMEs gave us amazing input, which is why we were able to stick to this idea and work on it." "It has been an honor," added Ravichandran. "I’d like to thank everyone involved."
Olivia Herneddo closed the competition with a heartfelt appreciation to all the “eager Sun Devils” who make these hackathons a success, praising their passion and drive to “try something new with emerging technologies to tackle consistent, persistent, or relevant and emerging problems.”
Those interested in tapping into their innovative potential through a Spark Challenge are invited to visit the official website to browse past stories, current partners and upcoming event opportunities.
Special thanks to the esteemed panel of judges who dedicated their time and expertise to evaluate project submissions:
RJ Millhouse, Assistant Professor, The Design School
Dan Munnerley, Executive Director, Next Lab
Safali Patel, Associate Vice President, Outreach & Student Services, ASU
Shivali Viswanath, Senior Product Manager, Zoom
For those curious to explore the creative pitches offered by the other eight competitors, a review of their innovative ideas can be found below.
Team: Dream Team (Cameron Dressler, Jensen Davis, Niko Whitaker, Olta Bozha)
The Dream Team’s idea was spurred by the unique challenges their international peers reported — particularly the urgency of securing a job post-graduation to maintain extended visa approval. However, language barriers can hinder their ability to excel in interviews and obtain crucial employment. To address this, the Dream Team proposes using Zoom AI Companion for practice job interviews, allowing users to specify the industry, job role, and even interviewer. Additionally, Zoom AI Companion tracks key metrics such as the frequency of technical vocabulary and filler words. Users can bookmark unfamiliar terms and practice interview questions, which are then integrated into a post-interview performance analysis report, offering personalized study recommendations and improvement strategies.
Team: AAVN
Skillswap enables Sun Devils to exchange skills, rewarding users with perks like Sun Devil Dining rewards, M&G credits and game tickets for their participation. Users can connect based on shared interests and goals, whether they need help with calculus or career advice. AI-driven matchmaking and recommendations personalize each user’s experience, offering relevant connections and sessions. Every session attended or taught earns points toward rewards and is enhanced by AI Study Room Companions, which provide prompts, resources and icebreakers to keep breakout rooms interactive and productive. Skillswap’s AI-powered career path matching also recommends skills and workshops aligned with individual goals. Integrated with Zoom’s scheduler, it relieves users of the tedious need to plan their busy agenda manually.
Team: Crossroads Innovations (Emma Cross, Katie Cross)
This team leveraged Zoom AI Meeting Coach with AI integrations to support learners with ASD. Their solution focused on pragmatics—the rules governing verbal and nonverbal communication in social and professional settings. The goal was to identify key pragmatic skills essential for success. A customized assessment dashboard provided relevant feedback, offering insights rooted in self-efficacy to foster autonomy in Zoom interactions and beyond. The team aimed to correlate voice patterns and visual engagement markers by integrating identity-free biometric solutions with Zoom AI Meeting Coach to create a more comprehensive coaching experience.
Team: Gradiators (Manan Gulati, Mrinaal Aarav, Sahil Panjwani, Sanyam Jain)
Career centers face high demand, leaving many students without access to mock interview practice. Team Gradiators believes AI provides a scalable solution to bridge this gap: introducing Zoomey, a virtual interview coach that offers real-time, data-driven feedback. Beyond evaluating speech, it analyzes audience perception, body language, and technical communication to enhance interview performance. Integrated into Zoom, Zoomey simulates actual interview conditions, helping users practice in a familiar professional setting. Early testing indicates a 40% increase in interview confidence after five practice sessions, with 75% of users identifying and adjusting unconscious habits through AI-driven analysis of tone, posture, and facial expressions.
Team: RCB (Kevin Shah, Shiv Patel)
An AI Professor, or “AIvatar,” is an integration presented by Team RCB to enhance Zoom’s AI Companion. It offers instant responses to inquiries, reducing wait times for professor feedback, and can summarize lecture recordings focusing on upcoming exam topics. To bridge language gaps, the AIvatar features real-time subtitles, voice translation and multilingual lecture translations. Additional support includes sign language interpretation, hands-free voice commands and colorblind-friendly settings. For exam prep, it offers mock timed exams, past paper access and personalized quizzes that target each user’s unique areas of difficulty. Performance data is securely encrypted and shared with professors to provide tailored guidance.
Team: Moneywell (Deepit Arora, Kushagra Dashora, Navya Gangrade, Virrajith Mallavarapu)
Students who rely on American Sign Language (ASL) often face challenges finding tutors equipped for non-verbal instruction, especially those available via Zoom. The issue lies in the limited availability of ASL-trained staff familiar with Zoom’s interface. To address this, team Moneywell introduced a real-time, AI-powered ASL integration for Zoom, featuring a "concept spotlight" that automatically identifies and highlights key concepts during tutoring sessions. This technology aims not only to make tutoring more accessible but also to scale effectively for future use in non-academic settings.
Team: SparkyCoders (Khushi Patel, Saketh Pabolu)
EduBot is an AI-powered academic coach that integrates with Zoom and Canvas, supporting online students with a knowledge base of course materials, such as textbooks, syllabi and lecture content. During lectures, students can interact with EduBot for instant clarification, with the AI continuously improving by analyzing live transcripts for additional context. EduBot also provides adaptive knowledge checks that automatically appear when professors switch topics, helping to track and assess student understanding. It also generates academic reports highlighting strengths and areas for improvement while organizing peer study groups based on shared challenges and interests. EduBot is accessible within Zoom, allowing students to engage with study groups, review past lectures, network and more – all in one handy, unified platform.
Team: Null Pointers (Mohit Jain, Saumya Soni)
Though instructors thrive on the energy and engagement of their students, online classrooms often present silence, static screens and unreadable faces, making it difficult to gauge whether students are engaged, following along, or in need of support. Team Null Pointers proposes an AI-powered integration that tracks student engagement, analyzing camera activity, facial expressions, eye movement, gestures, mouse interactions and chat responses. This integration provides instructors with instant insights into student attention levels and, when engagement drops, suggests corrective actions such as quizzes, polls, or group discussions to re-engage a distracted classroom. After each session, instructors receive a comprehensive dashboard with detailed engagement trends and actionable insights to improve future classes. These suggestions are integrated with Zoom AI Companion 2.0, prioritizing fairness, transparency and privacy.