8 Machine Learning Competitions for High School Students
Machine Learning (ML) competitions can be an exciting way for high school students to enhance their skills, not only in ML but also in AI and data analysis. Participating in a competition in high school will provide you with a valuable experience as you apply machine learning to real-world problems – and find solutions! ML competitions promote critical thinking, analytical skills, and creativity, all essential in the rapidly evolving tech landscape. Not to mention, they’ll look great on your college applications and resumes!
How did we select these competitions?
When listing these competitions, we looked at:
1. Accessibility - we looked at the costs associated with the competition and how beginner-friendly they are.
2. Educational support - we made sure to include competitions that provide you with additional resources, mentorship, and learning opportunities.
3. Interactive elements - an important part of a competition is learning by interacting with like-minded peers and having networking opportunities to learn from experts. We considered this while selecting competitions.
4. Incentives and prizes - while not the most critical factor, we did consider the prizes and incentives offered by competitions and whether they can help further interest and encourage students to keep learning.
With this in mind, we have compiled a list of 8 machine learning competitions for high school students!
1. Imagine Cup Junior by Microsoft
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: Students aged 13-18 can participate, with a maximum of six members per team.
Coding Level: Beginner
Prize: Prizing information for the junior cup is not available at the moment.
Dates: Registration closes in May (based on previous years).
Cost: No Cost
In this competition, organized by Microsoft, the challenge is to build innovative, accessible, and ground-breaking software with Microsoft tools and technology. The competition may be structured differently based on the country/region you are representing, so be sure to read your local country/region competition rules.
It’s an introduction to AI, machine learning, and cybersecurity. For the competition, you will have to design and propose a concept that addresses one of Microsoft’s AI for Good Initiatives. For the competition, Microsoft will provide each team with a set of resources, such as a beginner’s kit and a deep learning module, that will help you with your challenge.
Make sure you complete the student-focused training that will guide you through the competition.
2. Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) - Particularly, the category of Robotics and Intelligent Machines
Location: Hosted in different cities every year. ISEF 2024 will be in Los Angeles, CA.
Eligibility: All high-school students with a strong passion for research in science, math, and engineering are encouraged to apply. Students can participate individually or in teams.
Coding Level: Intermediate
Prize: Special Awards such as tuition scholarships, summer internships, and scientific trips, as well as cash prizes of up to $75,000 are awarded to winners.
Dates: ISEF 2024 will be held in May 2024 (tentatively, based on the 2023 schedule). Local and regional-level fairs have different dates. Please find the list here. Registration for 2024 may not have opened.
Cost: On-site registration of $25 for each participant.
A program by the Society for Science, ISEF is the world’s largest international pre-college science competition, inviting entries from thousands of students every year. You participate by presenting original work that has been going on for no longer than 12 months - the more recent, the better. Students keen on AI and machine learning can participate in the competition category: Robotics and Intelligent Machines and Engineering Mechanics. Each ISEF competition has specific guidelines (which you’ll find on the webpage once released) that you must go through before participating.
Note that to participate at Regeneron ISEF, you first must participate in a local or regional-level fair, and will then be shortlisted for the ISEF program that takes place in a hybrid format each year. Additionally, ISEF has a maximum 2-5% acceptance rate, making it extremely competitive. If you are interested in learning more about ISEF and how to win, check out this guide!
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: The eligibility criteria varies based on the challenge. Most have a minimum age requirement of 16 years.
Coding Level: Varies for different challenges, from beginner to advanced levels.
Prize: Awards also vary for different challenges, with a majority offering cash prizes of $5,000 and up.
Dates: Dates vary for different challenges. Once you’ve selected a challenge to participate in, please check its respective timeline.
Cost: No Cost
AIcrowd is a platform that helps organizations streamline their AI workflow and promotes using AI and ML to solve real-world problems, by running challenges in these fields. The platform helps develop, manage, and promote challenges presented by businesses, universities, government agencies, and NGOs.
At any given time, the platform has several active challenges you can participate in. Here are a few challenges currently open that have a machine learning focus and are open to students aged 16 and above:
- MosquitoAlert Challenge 2023: Small Object Detection and Classification.
- CityLearn Challenge 2023: Using AI for Building’s Energy Management.
4. Machine Learning Olympiad Community Competitions on Kaggle
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: The eligibility criteria varies for the different competitions. Most are open to everyone, while some have a minimum age requirement of 18 years.
Coding Level: Varies for different challenges, from beginner to advanced levels.
Prize: While awards vary for different competitions on Kaggle, a majority of the competitions under the ML Olympiad category do not offer any prizes.
Dates: Dates vary for different competitions. Once you’ve selected a competition to participate in, please check its respective dates.
Cost: No Cost
While Kaggle hosts numerous machine learning competitions throughout the year, ranging from beginner to advanced levels, here the focus is on the ML Olympiad competitions. ML Olympiad is a category of Kaggle Community Competitions hosted by ML GDE (Google Developer Experts), TFUG (TensorFlow User Group), and 3rd-party ML communities, supported by Google Developers.
You can participate in these competitions by forming teams and collaborating, or individually to solve real-world problems using datasets. Here are a few of the open competitions you can take part in:
- Recommend Books: visualize and train datasets to recommend the best books
- Detect Tree Deforestation: pixel-precise Argania tree deforestation detection using sentinel-2 satellite imagery
- Correct Multilingual Spellings: reconstruct noisy sentences in European languages: English, French, German, Bulgarian and Turkish
- Forecast CO2 Emission: Build a time series model to forecast CO2 emissions in Côte d'Ivoire.
- Work on a Predictive Maintenance Project: Determine whether a machine learning model could be used to perform predictive maintenance on turbofan engines.
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: This challenge is open to everyone. You can participate in a team or as an individual.
Coding Level: Intermediate
Prize: Three cash prizes are offered: Gold (€3,000 or $3180), Silver (€2,000 or $2,120) and Bronze (€1,000 or $1,060). The three winning teams will be invited to the university lab to test their solutions.
Dates: The first round of challenge begins in February and the final round (before the real-world experiment) is conducted in November. See the entire timeline here.
Cost: No Cost
Organized by the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Institute at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, the Robot Air Hockey Challenge offers a platform for students and researchers to interact with each other on a realistic robotic task. In the competition, teams (or individuals) will design and build their air hockey agents, competing against each other in different subtasks (in simulation) and finally in an entire game (both in simulation and in the real world).
In this challenge, you will be required to develop a robot agent that is robust to environmental disturbances, accomplishes safe and reasonable behavior, performs dynamic motions, adapts to the sim-to-real gap with limited real system interactions, and is able to control the mechanical system and win the game. Three winning teams will be invited to the university lab to test their solutions and deploy their approach on the real robot. These teams will compete against each other and against the provided baseline. The competition will be recorded and live-streamed.
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: The eligibility criteria varies for different hackathons hosted by Machine Hack. Most are open to everyone.
Coding Level: Hackathons at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels are hosted.
Prize: Awards vary for different hackathons – monetary, knowledge, hiring, and others.
Dates: Dates vary for different hackathons. When you’ve selected one to participate in, please check its respective dates.
Cost: No Cost
Machine Hack is an online platform that hosts a number of industry-curated machine learning competitions, or hackathons. These hackathons are typically tough business problems that can be solved by applying machine learning and data science concepts. As a participant, you’d be competing against hundreds of data scientists. These hackathons usually last several years, but entries are continuously evaluated.
Here are a few open hackathons you can participate in:
- Predict The News Category: Use Natural Language Processing to predict a news piece’s genre.
- Shell Hackathon to Protect Against Cyber Threats: Build an ML model capable of identifying code in a body of text.
- Predict The Flight Ticket Price Hackathon: Use ML to predict the price of a Flight ticket on any given day.
7. Applied Machine Learning Prototype Hackathon by Cloudera
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: Seniors can participate (18 years is the minimum age requirement).
Coding Level: Intermediate
Prize: There are three cash prizes – $6,000, $3,000, and $1,000.
Dates: Typically, the first phase is conducted October - December, and the second phase January - February. Dates for 2024 are yet to be announced.
Cost: No Cost
Cloudera’s Applied Machine Learning Prototypes (AMPs) are fully built end-to-end data science solutions that allow data scientists to go from an idea to a fully working machine learning model in a fraction of the time. AMPs provide an end-to-end framework for building, deploying and monitoring business-ready ML applications instantly. In this hackathon, you will be tasked with creating your own unique applied ML prototype. Your AMP should serve as an example to other data scientists for the best way to approach solving a business problem with ML methods. Using data from any public data set, your AMP should be a complete solution, with code to ingest data, wrangle that data, train and/or validate a model, and communicate the results of the model via an interactive web application. Some data repositories that you could choose from are FiveThirtyEight, data.gov, and HuggingFace.The projects will be reviewed by Cloudera Fast Forward Labs and winning entries will be added to the AMP Catalog.
8. Botball Educational Robotics Program
Location: Workshops and tournaments are conducted at regional levels across many countries.
Eligibility: Open to middle and high school students. Teams should consist of a minimum of 3 people.
Coding Level: Intermediate
Prize: Awards are offered, but the specifics on the awards are not provided at the moment.
Dates: Dates might differ based on your region. The final tournament is typically held in April. This calendar will be updated when the schedule is released!
Cost: Registration costs – $2,750 (new team) | $1,550 (returning team). Scholarships are available.
In the Botball Educational Robotics Program, middle and high school students will compete in teams by building autonomous robots using AI and ML techniques. After competing in a regional qualifier, teams from across the world compete in a final tournament. An advantage of participating in this tournament is that Botball provides the necessary resources to develop strategies using AI and embedded systems. To participate, you should brush up on languages such as C, C++, and Java.
This competition is a good fit for students who are interested in hands-on learning and competitions.
If you’re looking for a competitive mentored research program in machine learning, consider applying to Horizon’s Research Seminars and Labs!
This is a selective virtual research program that lets you engage in advanced research and develop a research paper in a subject of your choosing. Horizon has worked with 1000+ high school students so far, and offers 600+ research specializations for you to choose from.
You can find the application link here
Image Source: Botball Logo