CDS Sophomore and Team Wins at hack@brown
Sometimes winning a hackathon is as much about the business pitch as it is about technical execution. CDS sophomore Maheen Rassell and his NYU teammates discovered this reality when they competed at hack@brown 2025, where their educational debate game “Paw & Order” won the Best Use of MongoDB Atlas award.
“When you hear the word hackathon, you think it’s all coding. But when we presented to the judges, we realized it was like 80% business,” Rassell said. “Whatever you’re making needs to have a use case. You need to explain the idea, present it, say why it’s useful. The only technical thing is the demo.”
Maheen’s team’s winning project — created with two other NYU sophomores and one NYU freshman — addresses a fundamental educational challenge: providing personalized feedback to students during classroom debates and discussions.
“Schools don’t have enough time and resources to give every single student personalized feedback,” Rassell explained. “Usually when you see Socratic seminars or group discussions, often only a small number of kids are speaking, because they’re confident enough to speak in front of everyone, and so they’re the only ones who get feedback. What Paw & Order does is give that individual attention to everyone.”
The game takes place in a virtual courthouse where players receive randomly assigned debate stances. After a one-minute debate round, an AI system analyzes their performance and provides tailored feedback. The team envisions the platform helping K-12 students build confidence in their speaking abilities.
The journey to hack@brown began as a last-minute decision on a Friday night when a group of nine NYU friends (pictured) decided to make the four-hour drive to Brown University. They arrived in Rhode Island around 5 a.m., caught a few hours of sleep at a hotel, and headed to the competition Saturday morning. They split up into three teams, of which the Paw & Order team was one.
Creating Paw & Order required balancing different team members’ priorities. “Abdul really wanted to make a game, and Hisham and Alfardil and I really wanted to make an impact,” Rassell said. “We had this goal that none of us were going to sacrifice what we wanted. We wanted to make something that all four of us would be committed to.”
The name “Paw & Order” emerged from a search for cat puns, playing off the “arcade theme” of the hackathon while incorporating the judicial setting of their debate platform. “When [Hisham and I] both read ‘Paw & Order,’ we looked at each other and instantly knew we’d found the right name,” Rassell said.
Since the hackathon, Rassell has become passionate about AI’s role in education. He’s been consulting with professors studying AI ethics and K-12 classroom implementation.
“The perception right now is that if you’re using ChatGPT, you’re cheating,” Rassell noted. “AI in education specifically is a field that I grew passionate about after building this game, because there’s a lot more to be done. The unique thing about AI — and you see this in Paw & Order’s philosophy — is that using AI in the classroom can be applied on a student-by-student, case-by-case basis.”
The team is continuing development on Paw & Order, focusing on building a solid back end with proper database integration. They plan to establish their own user base before potentially seeking partnerships with established educational game platforms.
Three NYU teams participated in hack@brown, and remarkably, all three won awards in different categories — a testament to the cross-disciplinary talent at NYU.
By Stephen Thomas
