Breaking the Stereotype: How We Designed Our Way to 3rd Place at UniMelb FEIT Hackathon 2025
Kevin Bryan
The Spark That Started Everything
Walking into that packed theater with over 200 participants and 50+ teams, my heart sank. The sheer number of brilliant minds in one room made our chances feel microscopic. "No way we gonna even make it to top 15!," I thought to myself.
It was a regular Tuesday when a LinkedIn notification popped into my email: Microsoft was actively recruiting neurodivergent talent. Not just accepting them – seeking them out. As someone always curious about industry trends, I clicked through and fell down a rabbit hole that would reshape my entire perspective.
Fast forward a couple months to the FEIT Hackathon, and there it was – pure coincidence. Two of the six problem statements were exactly what I'd been thinking about: bridging the talent gap in tech jobs, and designing inclusive classrooms for ADHD and dyslexic learners. It felt like the universe was telling me to combine these ideas and create something that could help everyone.
Did you know 1 in 7 people have ADHD? That 70% are undiagnosed, walking through life wondering why they can't focus on boring tasks but can hyperfocus for 6 hours straight on something interesting? Or that when properly supported, they're 60-86% MORE productive than neurotypical workers?
Meanwhile, I was watching my CS graduate friends send out their 200th job application, getting silence in return. Eight months post-graduation, still unemployed, despite Australia desperately needing 286,000 tech workers by 2026. The math wasn't mathing.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Bootcamps
I watched friends drop $25,000 on coding bootcamps, only to sit in 8-hour sessions that felt like torture for anyone whose brain didn't work "normally." One friend with ADHD lasted exactly 3 days. Another with dyslexia couldn't keep up with the walls of documentation. They weren't failing because they couldn't code – they were failing because education wasn't designed for them.
The statistic that broke me: 72% of IT graduates can't get tech jobs within 6 months. Yet 3.3 million neurodivergent Australians are locked out entirely, not even counted in that statistic.
The Hackathon Challenge
When UniMelb's FEIT Hackathon Festival came around, among the 6 problem statements, two seemed written for us: bridging talent gaps and creating inclusive classrooms for ADHD/dyslexic learners. The coincidence was too perfect to ignore.
Kudos to our incredible team who made this possible:
Stanley, the backend wizard who made the RAG implementation
Fatih, bringing scalability expertise from real-world experience
Vijit, whose communication skills made complex ideas simple
Najih, our visionary who assembled the team and the prototype flow remotely despite being busy with family matters.
And myself :), taking on the designer role – creating the high-fidelity app designs, pitch deck, and ensuring every pixel embodied our mission
The "Aha!" Moment
"What if we made Duolingo, but for tech careers?"
But here's the twist – we'd design it neurodiversity-first. Not as an afterthought. Not as an "accessibility feature." But as the core design principle.
Think about it: when you design for someone with ADHD who needs rewards every 2 minutes, you create an engaging app for everyone. When you design for dyslexics who need visual learning, you help the 65% of people who are visual learners. It's like how captions, created for the deaf, are now used by everyone watching videos on mute.
We called it TikTekTo – a microlearning mobile app utilizing flash cards. Our mission was clear: we don't want to judge neurodivergent learners, we want to hug them and help them.
Every second counts. Every skill builds. Every career begins.
Building Simple
We transformed everything:
Scary documentation → Flash cards a 5-year-old could understand
8-hour bootcamp days → 5-minute micro-lessons
700-hour programs → 180 hours to job-ready
Walls of text → Keyword highlighting and text-to-speech
One-size-fits-all → AI-powered personalization using RAG
Judging different minds → Hugging and helping every learner
The technical implementation was surreal – diving into Retrieval Augmented Generation to create personalized learning paths, using Gemini API to generate content that costs $0.50 per user instead of $2000 for traditional courses.
The Pitch That Embodied Our Values
Here's where we got meta: if our app was about making things simple, fun, and easy to understand, shouldn't our pitch be the same?
When we made it to the top 15 finalists, our hearts were racing. While other teams prepared complex technical demonstrations, we stuck to our guns. No dense slides. No technical jargon. We presented with the same simplicity we built into TikTekTo. Visual storytelling. Bite-sized points. Even our slide design used principles of ADHD-friendly learning – high contrast, clear fonts, one concept per slide.
We even braved Melbourne's chilly weather, practicing our pitch in the park until our teeth were chattering. Looking back, those freezing rehearsal sessions were worth every shiver – they helped us nail the delivery when it mattered most.
The Moment of Truth
My heart was pounding at 149 BPM before our pitch (yes, I checked my smartwatch), and still racing at 100 during the final announcements. When they called our name for third place, it felt surreal. Our "too simple" approach had resonated with the judges. We'd proven that sometimes, the most powerful solutions are the ones that anyone can understand.
The Bigger Picture
As I write this, fueled by my fifth free coffee of the hackathon (thank you, sponsors!), there are still 286,000 empty tech jobs in Australia. There are still 3.3 million neurodivergent Australians told they're "not quite right" for the workforce. There are still bootcamps charging $25,000 for one-size-fits-all education that fits almost no one.
But now there's also TikTekTo. And a team that proved coders can design – especially when we're designing for the future where every type of mind has a place in tech.
Because here's the thing about breaking stereotypes: sometimes you don't just prove people wrong about what coders can do. Sometimes you prove them wrong about who deserves to become one.
#Neurodiversity #TechEducation #InclusiveDesign #UniMelbFEIT #Hackathon2025 #ADHD #Dyslexia #BreakingStereotypes