BEYOND THE DEFAULT.

Education systems need to prepare young people for complexity, uncertainty, emerging technologies and unfamiliar problems.

But a learning environment can unintentionally evaluate much more than the capability it intends to measure.

A rapid verbal answer may be mistaken for better reasoning. Comfort in a noisy room may be confused with resilience. Ease in unstructured group conversations may be interpreted as stronger collaboration.

For many neurodivergent young people, these conditions can introduce barriers unrelated to the intellectual challenge itself.

When that happens, we are not only assessing ability.

We are also assessing how comfortably a person fits the format we created.

Educational formats

Ambiguous instructions, artificial time pressure and a single way of presenting work can obscure understanding.

Sensory conditions

Noise, lighting, crowded environments and unpredictable transitions can consume attention and energy.

Executive demands

Starting tasks, prioritising, switching activities and managing time may require different forms of structure.

Communication

Written, visual, delayed or alternative forms of expression can reveal reasoning that immediate verbal responses may not.

Autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette syndrome and other neurodivergences do not describe a single cognitive profile.

Two people with the same diagnosis may have profoundly different abilities, experiences, preferences and support needs.

A diagnosis may describe part of a person's experience. It cannot describe an entire mind.

The opportunity is not to assume that every neurodivergent person brings an exceptional talent. It is to stop allowing unnecessary barriers to determine which abilities become visible.

Mars Challenge uses Mars as an extreme environment for learning to reason under constraints.

Finite resources, interdependent systems and difficult decisions force participants to question assumptions, collaborate across disciplines, explore possible solutions and take responsibility for what they propose.

The Neuroinclusive Mission uses the same educational engine.

What changes is the design of participation.

Mars Challenge asks what becomes possible when we change the conditions of a problem.

NO HUMAN B asks what becomes visible when we change the conditions through which people approach that problem.

ONE MISSION · DIFFERENT WAYS TO CONTRIBUTE

MARS CHALLENGE

Real problems · Constraints · Earth-Back Thinking

Different ways to understand

Different ways to collaborate

Different ways to demonstrate

CRITERION → DECISION → ACTION → RESPONSIBILITY

Shared intellectual and educational expectations

The mission does not remove meaningful difficulty, uncertainty or the need to make decisions.

It seeks to distinguish between two kinds of friction: the productive challenge of solving a complex problem and the avoidable barriers introduced by its format.

The former is essential to learning. The latter should be examined and, where possible, redesigned.

The challenge stays hard. The unnecessary friction changes.

Traditional inclusion often begins once a person encounters difficulty in a system built around someone else's assumed needs.

The Neuroinclusive Mission starts earlier.

What if participation were designed from the beginning to accommodate different ways of processing information, regulating attention, communicating and collaborating?

The question shifts from asking whether a young person can adapt to the existing format to asking whether the format accurately allows that person to demonstrate capability.

Equal ambition does not require identical conditions.

Fairness means evaluating the relevant quality of the work without unnecessarily privileging one style of participation.

We do not confuse rigour with rigidity.

Agency means more than being present.

It means having meaningful opportunities to understand, choose, contribute, act and assume responsibility.

For neurodivergent participants, that capacity can depend on the relationship between the person, the environment and the systems through which participation takes place.

The mission proposes five interconnected design principles.

The aim is not to create a predefined environment for a supposedly typical autistic, ADHD or otherwise neurodivergent participant.

The aim is to make participation sufficiently clear, flexible and responsive that individuals can exercise capability without being required to imitate a neurotypical pattern.

Well-designed support does not replace autonomy. It helps make autonomy possible.

The Neuroinclusive Mission does not replace Mars Challenge's core pedagogical process.

It introduces a neuroinclusive layer into that experience, providing different ways to access information, manage the environment, organise teamwork and demonstrate the reasoning behind a solution.

1. Anticipate
2. Understand
3. Regulate
4. Choose
5. Collaborate
6. Create
7. Demonstrate

These seven movements describe the neuroinclusive design experience. They do not replace the official Mars Challenge phases or constitute confirmed 2027 operating rules.

A participant may receive information about the schedule, spaces, rules and expected activities in advance.

They may have access to instructions in different formats, structured team roles, appropriate sensory options, breaks and communication channels compatible with the task.

Their contribution may be demonstrated through written, visual, oral or other suitable formats, while preserving the evidence and evaluation requirements of the programme.

Support should be available without requiring a young person to disclose a diagnosis publicly or become identified primarily through it.

The participant enters to investigate, question, collaborate, build, test and defend ideas.

They are not there to represent a diagnosis. They are there to exercise their capacity to create.

What becomes possible when a rigorous international learning challenge is designed for different minds from the beginning?

The mission aims to make visible not only completed projects, but also how participants think, make decisions, organise collaboration and respond to feedback.

Projects and prototypes

Solutions developed in response to real problems, explicit constraints and evidence.

Traceable decisions

Records showing how young people investigated, compared options, made choices and revised their reasoning.

Different team architectures

Roles and collaboration methods shaped by contributions rather than diagnostic categories.

Multimodal communication

Valid ways to express reasoning, present work and engage with feedback.

Talent made visible

Opportunities to observe analysis, creativity, synthesis, pattern recognition, problem-solving and other capabilities without stereotyping.

Institutional learning

Evidence about participation conditions that educational institutions can use to improve future experiences.

Success is not defined by a clinical change, a diagnosis or a claim that neurodivergent participants are inherently more creative.

It is defined by whether the learning environment allows young people to exercise their abilities and whether institutions learn how to remove avoidable barriers.

These are intended outcomes. They must be documented and evaluated before any impact claims are made.

Neuroinclusion is not simply a technical feature of an accessible interface.

It also requires dignity, privacy, consent, autonomy and safety.

The Neuroinclusive Mission is an educational experience, not a clinical intervention or a therapeutic assessment. Participation must not become a public disclosure of a diagnosis or a performance of personal adversity.

The foundational framework identifies five essential safeguards:

These are foundational commitments. Their implementation must be validated through appropriate protocols, accessible information, applicable law and the participation of neurodivergent people themselves.

No participant should need to appear neurotypical, conceal how they function or disclose a diagnosis publicly to make a legitimate contribution.

Mars Challenge × NO HUMAN B brings together two agendas that are often managed independently: neurodivergent participation and high-ambition educational innovation.

Its purpose is not to organise a separate, less demanding competition for young people considered different.

It is to create conditions in which neurodivergent young people can enter a demanding international experience, and in which the wider educational system can learn from the resulting design.

Governments and public authorities

Connect youth policy, inclusion, education and innovation while exploring ways to make demanding learning opportunities more accessible.

Schools and universities

Engage neurodivergent learners in challenge-based education, develop mentor capabilities and examine current participation barriers.

Neurodivergent young people and organisations

Help define priorities, identify unnecessary friction and influence the design of the experience itself.

Researchers and technology partners

Contribute methods, tools and responsible evaluation while respecting privacy and avoiding clinical experimentation.

Companies and philanthropic partners

Support environments where emerging talent can develop and demonstrate capabilities relevant to complex real-world challenges.

The institutional benefit extends beyond direct participants.

The foundational objective is for the lessons of the Neuroinclusive Mission to inform the wider Mars Challenge system where they prove useful.

That feedback loop is central.

If the mission concludes within a permanently separate circuit, it has not achieved its wider purpose.

MARS CHALLENGE · 2027 EDITION

How Much Intelligence Can the Planet Sustain?

A shared global question about the physical, environmental and human limits of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is changing how knowledge is produced, information is accessed and problems are solved.

But the development of more powerful systems also raises a human question.

Are we creating technologies that recognise different forms of human capability, or reproducing the assumptions of a standard user?

The Neuroinclusive Mission brings a distinct perspective to the 2027 challenge.

AI may offer opportunities for multimodal communication, personalised access to information, task planning, assistive interaction and alternative ways to express ideas.

At the same time, automated systems may inherit biases about language, attention, behaviour, productivity and what constitutes a valid response.

The mission encourages participants and institutions to investigate questions such as:

• Can AI help people demonstrate reasoning without forcing them into a single communication format?
• How can technologies support autonomy rather than create new dependencies?
• What happens when automated systems confuse different communication styles with lower competence?
• How should privacy and consent be protected when personal support needs interact with digital systems?
• What forms of human judgement should remain central even as AI becomes more capable?

The 2027 mission does not presume that technology is always the answer. Its responsibility is to investigate when technology genuinely expands agency and when better human-centred design is needed.

The future of intelligence cannot be built around the assumption that there is only one kind of human mind.

The Mars Challenge × NO HUMAN B partnership brings together a global learning system and independent expertise in human variability, autonomy and participation design.

Mars Challenge provides the educational mission, its challenge architecture and its standards for learning, decision-making and responsible action.

NO HUMAN B brings its beyond the default approach, focusing on the relationship between person, environment and system.

The proposed development follows a cumulative roadmap.

1. 2026 — Foundational Alliance Define the shared principle: one mission, the same ambition, different minds. Establish the initial neuroinclusive design architecture.
2. 2027 — Foundational Cohort Develop a first international cohort focused on autistic young people, those with ADHD and other neurodivergences, with diversity of needs and ways of participating.
3. 2028 — Protocols and Capacity Develop facilitator training, participation resources and mechanisms for institutional learning.
4. 2029 — Evidence and Policy Examine participation indicators, applied research opportunities and transfer of learning to educational and youth systems.
5. 2030 — Return to the Core Integrate demonstrated improvements into the broader Mars Challenge architecture wherever appropriate.

This is the foundational roadmap, not a confirmation that every milestone has been funded, formally approved or implemented.

Nothing resets.

Each cycle should reduce avoidable friction and increase the capacity of the next cycle to make different forms of talent visible.

The ambition is not to create a protected space disconnected from the world.

It is to improve the conditions in which neurodivergent young people can participate in shaping it.

NO HUMAN B™ is an independent organisation. Mars Challenge × NO HUMAN B — Neuroinclusive Mission identifies its mission within the Mars Challenge educational ecosystem.

The foundational phase of the Neuroinclusive Mission is an invitation to help build an experience that cannot be designed credibly without neurodivergent young people themselves.

Mars Challenge and NO HUMAN B invite conversations with young people, neurodivergence organisations, schools, universities, governments, families, researchers and organisations capable of contributing to a rigorous, respectful and accessible international mission.

The initial priority is not scale for its own sake.

It is to develop a sufficiently diverse and well-supported founding cohort to understand what conditions allow different neurodivergent participants to exercise their capabilities under shared intellectual standards.

Participation requirements, dates, operational safeguards and application procedures for 2027 remain subject to formal confirmation. Expressions of interest are not registrations or guarantees of admission.

Different minds. Same mission.

We do not need a smaller challenge for neurodivergent young people.

We need a global challenge designed to recognise more of what different minds can contribute.

Same ambition. Different ways to show what a mind can do.