FEIT Hackathon Festival

The 2026 FEIT Hackathon Festival has wrapped up, with over 300 students participating in this year's flagship event.

Spanning three exciting days, the 2026 FEIT Hackathon Festival brought together students to explore innovative solutions across the themes of Future Cities/Future Work/Future Energy. The atmosphere was electric, with teams collaborating, pushing the boundaries of technology, and applying their skills to tackle real-world industry challenges. The festival showcased the creativity, technical expertise and problem-solving capabilities of our students as they worked together to turn bold ideas into impactful solutions.

During the three days, participants had the unique opportunity to learn from top industry leaders, attending skill development workshops and networking events. These interactions provided invaluable insights, helping teams refine their approaches to the Hackathon’s central challenge.

The event culminated in a celebratory closing ceremony, where the top three teams were awarded from a prize pool totalling $11,000 from Airwallex. In addition to these awards, RPM Hire, SMEC AI and Untapped Talent also provided additional prizes.

All participants had the opportunity to showcase the skills and knowledge they developed throughout the hackathon, exploring innovative solutions across the themes of Future Cities/Future Work/Future Energy with the expertise of Melbourne Plus. The students collaborated to develop industry-inspired solutions to a selection of problem statements they could choose from.

Congratulations to this year's winners:

First place: Flying Chinese - Zhenqian Liu, Jiayin Liu, Tony Gao, Huiying Wang and YueQi Li.
Second place: Taj Tea-m - Advait Rao, Joel Jishu, Timothy Mathews, Tamara Mapley and Raina Chi.
Third place: Future, You Up? - Manushresth Krishnan, Jordan Ung, Hitasvi Darshankumar Shukla, Mingrun Li and Mobark Bacran.

This years' winning team, ‘Flying Chinese’ solved ‘Problem Statement 1,’ under the theme of 'Future Work', which concerned skill development and AI in the workplace.

Problem Statement 1:

Getting good: If AI does the 'beginner' work, where does expertise come from?

Every expert became good the same way: doing small, low-stakes work badly, over and over, with someone correcting them. Those are precisely the tasks that are being automated first — so the ladder into skilled work is losing its bottom rungs, not by decision, but because skipping them is rational for everyone involved.
Design how a person becomes genuinely good at something when the beginner version of their work is already solved.

Flying Chinese pitched Viva, a program that would allow junior coders to explain changes they've made to code to ensure they understand and are learning from their work, without losing the speed benefits that come with integrating AI with coding.

winners — Student team Flying Chinese presenting Viva. L-R: Huiying Wang, Jiayin Liu, Tony Gao and Zhenqian Liu.

Key Sponsors

Airwallex is the major sponsor of the 2026 FEIT Hackathon Festival, marking this their fourth consecutive year of sponsorship. This consistent support highlights their role as a strategic industry partner of the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.

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