Thanks to everyone for the nice comments and feedback!
I (the teacher) am very proud of my two students who worked together to come up with this game and build it from scratch. Seeing their reaction to all of your nice words has been a great experience. We for sure made two new, future game developers with this jam :)
We plan to update this game and make it a series of small speedrun levels (inspired by Neon White) when the jam is over and the results are out - so please add the game to a collection of yours to stay updated.