Campus & Community

Addressing Belonging Among Neurodiverse Students, ‘Dialog’ Wins No Code Design Sprint

Wednesday, February 14, 2024, By Martin Walls

Dialog, an application to increase a sense of belonging on campus for students with disabilities, won the fast-paced, seven-day No Code Design Sprint, hosted by ϲ Libraries, the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA), and School of Education (SOE), in partnership with Intelligence++.

The final round—a pitch competition—occurred Feb. 9 in the Whitman School of Management and was led by Don Carr, professor in the VPA School of Design, and Kai Alexander Patricio G’23, a design consultant at Matchstix in Brooklyn, New York.

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Four students pose indoors with an oversized check after winning the No Code Design Sprint competition.

The students behind “Dialog,” an application to increase a sense of belonging on campus for student with disabilities, won the fast-paced, seven-day No Code Design Sprint competition.

A multidisciplinary team, Dialog consists of Fasika Melese G’18, G’19, a doctoral student in SOE’s instructional design, development and evaluation program; Viha Mashruwala, G’24, a master’s degree student in the School of Information Studies’ applied data science program; Lang Delapa ’24, a senior in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications’ advertising program; and Sawyer Tardie ’27, a first-year student in the Whitman School of Management.

The Dialog team consulted with students from SOE’s to identify a challenge neurodiverse students face—loneliness. To increase their sense of belonging, the team designed and developed a mobile app to help develop communication skills, including journaling prompts, discussion boards, daily challenges and more.

Honorable mention went to LearSona, a team that developed a working prototype of an app that offers academic content to users in a medium that fits their learning preference, such as visual, textual or kinesthetic.

Other teams pitching their ideas—and developing —w:

  • Optimal Assessment, an artificial intelligence-powered teaching and assessment “co-pilot” for professors, to tailor course content for different learning preferences;
  • Equilearn, a learning platform to address the “pain points” of accessible education; and
  • BookTalk, a platform that encourages neurodiverse students to better understand material by sharing learnings with each other.

The Design Sprint began on Feb. 2, with an intensive workshop on no code and inclusive design led by Patricio. The author of “,” Patricio is an expert in regenerative design, inclusive design, interaction design and the development of new digital interfaces.

After the initial workshop, teams assembled to create a minimum viable product for an inclusive product or service that could vie for the pitch competition prize of $500, plus $5,000 in Amazon Web Services credits.

Coaches for the week of intensive idea development were: Samantha Calamari, senior learning experience designer, Microsoft; Quinton Fletchall, senior design researcher, Conifer Research; Max Mirho, content creator, Make with Max; and Andrew Tsao, founder, Codeless Coach.

The competition judges were: Samantha Calamari; Seth Gitner and Adam Peruta ’00, G’04, associate professors in the Newhouse School’s magazine, news and digital journalism program; Aimara Rodriguez, co-founder of Function Wellness; Brenton Strine, co-founder and CTO of Kicky Art; and Gianfranco Zaccai ’70, H’09, co-founder of the innovative design firm EPAM Continuum and Founder of . Joining the hosts as competition sponsors were the and .