Homework, Minus the Nagging: A 13-Year-Old's AI 'Virtual Parent' Earned ¥18,000 in Three Days
At a no-judge hackathon in Hangzhou, 13-year-old Zhu Shuhan sold a camera-based 'virtual parent' that sits beside a child during homework and earned more than 18,000 yuan in three days. Online, the real figure quickly ballooned into a 'million-yuan order'—a gloss the reporting does not support.
Last week in Hangzhou, about fifty teams were given 48 hours, a table, and one instruction: the only judge is a real customer willing to pay. The event called itself a “Markethon,” a marketing hackathon with no panel of experts and no score sheet. The third-place finisher was Zhu Shuhan, a 13-year-old who had just started her second year of junior high school in Shanghai.
Her product is a virtual study companion called Zàichǎng (“Present”). A parent uploads a photo, and a digital stand-in appears on the screen while a child does homework. Through the camera, the app notices when the child picks up a phone, falls asleep at the desk, or leaves the seat, and the virtual parent issues a gentle spoken reminder. When the session ends, it produces a focus report. Zhu says the app deliberately softens the reminder, does not store the video, and leaves a child some room. As she explained to Xinhua Daily, “I don’t like snitching, so I hoped it could stay gentle and give the child a little space.”
The inspiration came from her own afternoons at the desk. Her parents could not always sit beside her, and she admitted that she sometimes got distracted or secretly played on her phone. She said she barely understands programming; using AI tools, she took an idea from first sketch to a working core in three or four days. Over the three-day event, nearly 90 people paid for the service, lifting her net revenue past 18,000 yuan (about $2,500). She has said she hopes to price the finished product at 99 yuan and let market feedback drive the next version.
That grounded story did not survive its passage through Weibo. The trending phrase escalated to “13-year-old lands a million-yuan AI contract,” which some users received with suspicion. It has all the marks of the platform’s arithmetic of virality: a real figure repeated often enough becomes a bigger, less believable one. Lawyers weighed in that minors doing online work need guardian consent and that the gig-style market carries real risks for underage sellers. The correction, of course, traveled nowhere near as far as the exaggeration.
The detail worth keeping is not the money. It is that a middle-schooler with no coding background could turn a familiar pain—homework, distraction, a parent who is not home—into a small, working product over a weekend. That follows a pattern this site has been tracking: AI keeps lowering the threshold between having an idea and shipping it, whether the maker is a 60-year-old animator building a cyberpunk short on his own or a student prototyping in a Hangzhou exhibition hall. Zhu’s app is not an engineering breakthrough, and she did not claim it was. Its real novelty is that the idea came from inside childhood, and its first users paid for it with money, not applause.