UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of Penn State undergraduate students received an honorable mention at the LA Hacks 2026 hackathon competition for a Roblox-based game that helps players build media literacy skills. Pixel Truth, described as “an interactive game where players see how information choices shape a community,” was developed by Leona Chen, a rising junior in computer science and mathematics, Devin Myers, a rising junior in computer engineering, and Pranav Singhal, a rising junior in computer science.
The game competed in the Roblox Civility Challenge, a category where participants created games focused on digital well-being and mental health.
LA Hacks, an annual student-led hackathon hosted on-campus at UCLA, was held April 24-26, hosting over 1,000 participants. Competitors have 36 hours to create innovative tech projects in several categories, including healthcare, education, entertainment and more.
“Our team booked a breakout room in the ECoRE building and spent hours ideating,” Myers said. “You can arrive at LA Hacks with ideas, but you can’t have any code prepared. We spent hours looking at each track, jotting down ideas and discussing the scope of each potential project. We needed to understand what was realistic for each project, what the trade-offs might be.”
The team settled on Pixel Truth, partially because Singhal had experience in Roblox game development, and the team was inspired by the National Association for Media Literacy Education and wanted to create an interactive experience for navigating misinformation online.
“We didn’t just want to compete for awards,” Myers said, “but we wanted to create something we could be proud of.”
In the game, players navigate a virtual city and interact with characters that require evaluating news headlines and social media posts for trustworthiness. Accurately determining whether a piece of news is reliable or not raises the player’s “city trust” metric, which has a visible impact on the city.
“When trust collapses, the city begins to fall apart,” says Pixel Truth’s description. “The skyline darkens, buildings ignite, and social stability deteriorates.”
The developers wanted to translate the abstract concept of “trust in information” into a tangible metric to better understand how misinformation can impact a community.
“We wanted to be creative with our game design,” Singhal said. ”Making a complex topic like misinformation into something fun to learn was a hurdle.”
Singhal said the judges, in giving Pixel Truth an honorable mention, cited the importance of the topic for themselves and their children as they navigate complex media landscapes.
Chen said the Hackathon experience gave her significant knowledge and experience in game and story development as well as how to captivate a target audience.
“Everything in the demo is real and playable,” the team said on their game’s webpage. “Through teaching each other everything as we went, we all came out of the weekend able to understand and navigate the full project.”
To learn more about Pixel Truth and watch the gameplay trailer, visit the team’s Devpost page.