A team of Carnegie Mellon undergraduates took second place at the PennApps hackathon, Sept. 6-8, creating a Super Duper Mario app for Android that superimposes a Super Mario Brothers game over a real-world background as captured in real-time by the camera on the player's smartphone.

More than 1,000 graduate and undergraduate students from more than 100 universities participated in this semester's PennApps, which claims to be the largest university hackathon in the world.

The CMU team, which won a $5,000 prize for its creation, includes Daniel Lu, Cindy Xu, Shan Huang and Yuye Zhang. All are seniors and computer science majors; Lu also majors in math and Huang has a second major in human-computer interaction.

In the team's hack, Mario runs along edges detected by the camera, such as tabletops or walls, while the game randomly places coins in the playing field for Mario to grab.

PennApps is a 48-hour event that occurs each semester at the University of Pennsylvania. Students compete to create apps, games or something else "awesome."