An idea, a project born out of thinking about teenagers’ mental wellbeing, ended up carrying two Bangladeshi students all the way to Seoul. And once there, their team beat out 252 teams from 16 countries to land at the very top. This isn’t a movie plot, it’s a real achievement that happened this very month.
Two students from Dhaka Residential Model College, Md. Shafiul Alam Siddiqui Shrestho and Aronno Abeer Khan Prapya, won first place at the 16th e-ICON World Contest 2026, held in Seoul, South Korea. Their team, “Arup-Beat,” walked away with the competition’s highest honor, the Minister of Education of the Republic of Korea Award.
A competition where making the top ten among 756 people was already the hard part
This year’s contest drew 252 teams from 16 countries, roughly 756 students and teachers in total. Out of that massive field, only 10 teams from 8 countries made it to the final round. Following the final round held in Seoul from August 3 to 7, the champion was announced at the awards ceremony at the Stanford Hotel Seoul on August 7, and the name called was Arup-Beat. The competition was organized by South Korea’s Ministry of Education, with management handled by the Korea Digital Education Frontiers Association.
Arup-Beat wasn’t just a team of two Bangladeshi students, it was an international team. Led by Shrestho, the four-member team also included two students from Seongje Middle School in South Korea, Yeongyu Lee and Junmo Kim.
Lighthouse, an app that listens to what teenagers are actually feeling
Working under UN Sustainable Development Goal 3, “Good Health and Well-Being,” the team built an AI wellness web app called “Lighthouse,” designed to support teenagers’ mental wellbeing. At the heart of the app is an AI companion named “Lumi,” who can speak in three languages, Bangla, English, and Korean. That linguistic range alone shows the project was built with a global audience in mind from the very start.
The team didn’t stop at software either. They also built a screen-free hardware device called the “Lighthouse Beacon,” designed for teenagers who occasionally want a break from their phones. Building in a way to step away from screens, inside an app meant to support mental health, shows just how deeply the team understood the problem they were solving.
The people behind this journey
The entire project was supervised by Syed Mahbub Hasan Amiri, a teacher at Dhaka Residential Model College, and Sunyoung Yoon, a teacher at Seongje Middle School. This joint supervision across two countries is itself an example of how an idea can grow beyond borders.
News of this achievement was also covered in South Korean media, a sign that the significance of this win reached well beyond Bangladesh.
From a small idea to a global stage
Shrestho and Abeer’s story is a reminder of a simple truth, a good idea paired with sustained effort and the right guidance can travel far beyond the walls of a school or college, all the way to a global stage. Taking on something as important, yet often overlooked, as mental health, and turning it into a real solution through technology, this entire journey stands as an inspiration for Bangladesh’s young innovators.
