14 Best AI Competitions for High School Students in 2024
If you’re a high school student passionate about artificial intelligence, then you are probably looking to participate in AI competitions. Competitions allow you to apply your theoretical knowledge in practical, real-world challenges. Many competitions will hone your leadership and project management skills while also allowing you to develop collaborative skills.
In this list, we have detailed 14 AI competitions for high school students. Note that while all competitions are AI centric, some are hackathons which require you to heavily rely on the use of AI concepts!
1. World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth 2024
Location: Online and in-person options available (in-person competitions can be co-hosted with local organizers in other countries)
Eligibility: Students aged 6 – 18
Prize: Students receive awards but there is no monetary prize
Cost: Free
Program dates: December 2024 (tentatively, based on last year)
Application deadline: November 25, 2024 (tentatively, based on last year)
Students worldwide can register for this AI competition where they will compete based on their age, that is, whether they are elementary, middle, or high school students. You can work as an individual or a team and choose from three different competition tracks — AI Showcase Track, AI Generated Art Track, or AI Large Language Model Track. Once you submit your project, it will be judged on the basis of your understanding of the use of AI, the project’s impact on the community, and the user experience.
Should you make it through to the final round, you will present your work and take part in a Q&A round, before the winner is announced. Previous winners have worked on projects like an AI-integrated app that helps visually impaired people and an AI-assisted face mask detector.
This is a great competition for anyone who is passionate about AI ethics and how AI can solve important problems in the community. You can learn more about WAICY here. Here is an official recap from the 2022 competition! Also check out their AI resources.
Here are 8 tips to help you win WAICY!
Location: Online
Eligibility: Participants must fall into one of two age groups: 13 – 18 years old and 18+ years
Prize: $5,000, Intel-powered laptop, and mentorship opportunities are awarded to the global winners. Regional winners may get between $500 – $1,000.
Cost: Free
Program dates: September 2024 (tentatively, based on last year)
Application deadline: Not specified
This competition is part of the broader Intel AI Global Impact Festival, which annually showcases the latest innovations and talks by experts in the fields. The AI Impact Creators competition takes place at a global level and revolves around social impact AI projects.
Previous winning projects include a tool that can help people have regular heart check-ups
and a code summarizer that improves the accessibility of coding to non-English speaking individuals. Coming from a well-known company like Intel, this competition offers a fair amount of recognition and benefits for those who want to pursue a career in the field. However, it can be quite competitive!
You can check out past winners here!
Location: Online and in-person components included (varies by region and year)
Eligibility: High school and university-level students
Cost: $200 and extra costs might be incurred due to the required hardware
Program dates: June 7 - June 8, 2024 (for final challenge)
Application deadline: October 2023
Organized by the Robotics Education & Competition (REC) Foundation, the Vex AI Competition is a great way for students to explore the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence. Along with your team, you will work on two robots.
The focus is on robots being able to function and interact with their environment autonomously — such as being able to navigate an obstacle course. You would need to be familiar with areas like motor planning, computer vision, and haptic feedback integration for this project. However, you might need to apply through your school or another organization for this competition, so keep that in mind.
Location: Online
Eligibility: Students of 13 years of age or more
Prize: $5,000, a free CVDL Master Program by OpenCV, and a certificate of excellence for first place with other prizes available for runners-up
Cost: Free
Program dates: December 21, 2024 (tentatively, based on previous year’s dates)
Application deadline: November 30, 2024 (tentatively, based on previous year’s dates)
The OpenCV AI Competition is an international open-source challenge involving projects that focus on computer vision and AI. You can participate individually or in a team of up to 3 people and must submit a project using the OpenCV Library. Apart from that one restriction, you pretty much get to work on developing your project however you like.
Robotics, agriculture, education, health, and other areas are indicated but you do not have to stick to these. You will spend the first phase of the competition working on the proposal and the second phase implementing it. In the end, you will have to submit a project report, demo video and the source code.
5. Numerai
Location: Online
Eligibility: Open to all (students and adults)
Prize: Numerai’s cryptocurrency (NMR)
Cost: Free. However, once you stake NMR there may be potential costs
Program dates: New submission rounds begin every week with specific timings for submission windows
If you’re interested in the intersection of data science, AI, and finance, and have a strong skill set in these areas already, Numerai should be on your radar. It is a data science competition where your goal will be to develop machine learning models that can predict the stock market. Afterward, you can stake Numerai’s cryptocurrency on your predictions and earn rewards based on its performance.
While Numerai is a reputed competition that has been featured in magazines like Forbes, it’s the real-world interaction and valuable resources that make it a truly unique experience. However, the crypto reward might not be for everyone. It is important to note that this competition is not suitable for beginners — it is fairly advanced and open to adults for participation as well.
6. AIHacks
Location: Online
Eligibility: High school females and gender non-conforming students
Prize: Previous prizes have included Oculus VR Headsets, Amazon Echos, and Polaroids
Cost: Free
Program dates: September 5, 2024 – September 7, 2024 (tentatively, based on previous year’s dates)
Application deadline: Not specified
A student-run competition, AIHacks is meant to encourage women and gender non-conforming students in the field of AI. As a participant, you will attend workshops and then work in teams to solve problems with code.
Previous winners have worked on projects like a website that provides user-determined safe routes for people when walking alone and a website that helps reunite owners with their dogs through a search and sort system. This is an ideal option for those who are interested in the field but have no previous knowledge. The program’s mentors and workshops will teach you everything you need!
7. I’m Something of a Painter Myself
Location: Online
Eligibility:Open to everyone
Prize: None
Cost: None
Program dates: The competition began in August 2020 and it has a rolling leaderboard.
If you’re particularly interested in computer vision and the intersection of data science and visual art, you should definitely look at participating! The challenge is to build a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) — comprising a generator and discriminator model — to generate 7,000 to 10,000 Monet-style images.
Your work will be evaluated based on the MiFID (Memorization-informed Fréchet Inception Distance) – the smaller it is, the more accurate your images are. Working with GANs will train you in the field of artificial intelligence and its use in image generation while also honing your coding skills in general.
8. Bitgrit’s Bird Species Classification Challenge
Location: Online
Eligibility: No specific criteria given
Prize: None (it’s a learning competition)
Cost: None
Program dates: The competition began in May 2022 and is still ongoing
Submission deadline: Rolling submissions, 3 per day allowed
This competition involves the application of artificial intelligence to a specific problem. While Bitgrit usually offers a number of different competitions, this one requires participants to develop a machine-learning model that can predict a bird’s species based on its attributes and geographical locations.
Rather than a fixed winner, the competition has a leaderboard that shows the participants with the highest scores. This is a great option for those who have just started learning about AI and want some practice.
9. AIcrowd’s Melting Pot Challenge at NeurIPS
Location: Online
Eligibility: Applicants who are at least 16 years old, including professionals
Prize: $5,000 for the first place, $3,000 for the second, and $2,000 for the third
Cost: Free
Program dates: August 31, 2024 - November 15, 2024 (tentatively, based on previous year’s dates)
Application deadline: None
AIcrowd is another platform where you can find a variety of AI-based challenges. The Melting Pot Challenge is organized by researchers from the Cooperative AI Foundation, MIT, and Google DeepMind. In teams, you must develop multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) solutions that promote teamwork and discourage undesirable behavior in various specific scenarios.
The goal is to see how well computer programs adapt to each other and improve the cooperativeness of AI systems during real-world teamwork. Top performers will receive an invitation to co-author a report for NeurIPS 2024 (an annual AI conference).
10. Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair
Location: Los Angeles. CA
Eligibility: All (even international) high school students
Prize: $5,000 for the first place with cash awards going to 3 runners-up
Cost: $25 registration fee
Program dates: Regional/local fairs usually conclude by April, ISEF takes place from May 11 - May 17. 2024
Application deadline: 12 days after the regional/local fair
With an acceptance rate of 2-5%, the Regeneron ISEF is not only highly competitive but also extremely prestigious. It is a project-based science competition where you must present an individual or team-based research project that belongs to one of these categories (a wide range of subjects in the field of science). The research should not have been going on for longer than 12 months.
The only drawback is that to be eligible for this competition, you need to first participate in a regional/local fair and then get shortlisted for ISEF. It can seem like an arduous process, but the recognition and access to opportunities that come with ISEF is worth taking the trouble. If you want to get an idea of the kind of projects accepted, you can go through project abstracts here. You can also check out our complete guide to ISEF here!
11. The Trojan Detection Challenge (LLM Edition)
Location: Online
Eligibility: Open to all
Prize: Monetary prizes range from $500 - $5,000
Cost: Free
Program dates: July 26, 2024 - October 29, 2024 (tentatively, based on previous year’s dates)
Unlike the other entries on this list, this competition is not project-based. It comprises two tracks: The Trojan Detection Track, where participants must identify triggers for trojans embedded in LLMs, and the Red Teaming Track, which challenges participants to develop automated methods that induce specific undesirable behaviors in LLMs.
Overall, you will advance your understanding of the methods used to detect hidden functionality in large language models. This is a great choice if you have an interest in cybersecurity, natural language processing, AI safety, risk assessment and the like.
Here is a bonus competition for interested students!
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: Open to everyone who are U.S. residents/ citizens, and are above 18 years of age or the legal majority in their current country of residence
Prize: Varies based on competition
Cost: No Cost
Registration deadline: Rolling Registrations
Driven Data works on projects that are at the intersection of data science and social impact, in areas such as development, health, education, research and conservation, and public services. They run online data science and machine learning competitions with social impacts, with projects from organizations like NASA, Microsoft, Meta AI, and The World Bank!
Currently, Driven Data is holding a Research Rovers prize competition with NASA where they will prototype and demo an AI-based research assistant solution for the NASA workforce. Some tasks that the assistant must do are identifying seminal papers in particular domains, summarizing research results across different publication formats and standards, and more!
Data Driven has similar active projects, so everyone can find a project that they’re interested in! For example, you can participate in a competition by Meta that focuses on content tracing, or you can use unsupervised machine learning to extract insights about older adult falls from emergency department narratives.
13. CodaLabs
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: Open to everyone
Prize: Varies based on competition
Cost: No Cost
Registration deadline: Varies based on competition
Competition Date: Varies based on competition
CodaLab Competitions is an open source framework for running competitions that are typically about machine learning, AI and data science. The topics of these competitions can range from comparing dictionaries and word embeddings to detecting partially fake audio.
One active competition right now is the Alice Benchmarks competition. Alice Benchmarks aims to test domain adaptation methods when the source data is synthetic data. In this competition, there are 3 tasks - pedestrian re-identification, vehicle re-identification and scene semantic segmentation. For the object re-id, the source and target domains will be in completely different classes. Your role will be to retrieve the pedestrian instances of the same ID as the query image. If you are interested in learning more about this specific competition, here is the overview!
Codalabs has similar competitions across all experience levels. It is a great opportunity to explore real life applications of data science!
14. Kaggle’s Spaceship Titanic
Location: Virtual
Eligibility: Open to everyone
Prize: Not Specified
Cost: No Cost
Registration deadline: No deadline, it has a rolling leaderboard that began in 2022.
Spaceship Titanic sets up a futuristic scenario where a spaceship suffers a collision that sends half its passengers to a different dimension. Using records from the spaceship’s damaged computer system, you must predict which passengers were transported to rescue them.
Your results will be judged based on their classification accuracy and the percentage of predicted labels that are correct. Through this competition, you can hone your programming skills, and data preprocessing skills and delve into the fundamentals of machine learning!
Another similar competition geared for beginners is the Titanic – Machine Learning from Disaster competition.
If you’re looking to build unique projects in the field of AI/ML, consider applying to Veritas AI!
Veritas AI was founded by Harvard graduate students, and through the programs, you get a chance to learn the fundamentals of AI and computer science while collaborating on real-world projects. You can also work 1-1 with mentors from universities like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and more to create unique, personalized projects. In the past year, we had over 1000 students learn data science and AI with us. You can apply here!
Image Source: Intel Logo