The White House has launched its new Presidential AI Challenge to spur students and teachers to solve problems in their schools and communities with the help of AI.
The goal, the White House says, is to make America a leader in AI, and it’s part of a broader push by the administration to infuse the technology throughout K-12 schooling.
“We are living in a moment of wonder, and it is our responsibility to prepare children in America,” said first lady Melania Trump during a Sept. 4 meeting of the White House task force on AI education. “We must ensure America’s talent—our workforce—is prepared to sustain AI’s progress, and the Presidential AI Challenge is our first major step to galvanize America’s parents, educators, and students with this mission.”
The Trump administration is pushing that agenda even though it has canceled research contracts, terminated STEM education grants, and has proposed further cuts that some experts fear could undermine its AI goals.
Trump’s challenge counters a negative AI narrative
The White House is inviting K-12 students and educators to participate in the nationwide competition to “solve real-world problems in their communities using AI-powered solutions.”
Student participants must either create a proposal for how artificial intelligence technologies could be applied to address a community problem or build a solution with AI that can help address that problem.
Educators are also invited to propose new and unique ways to teach an AI concept to their students or create an AI tool to manage an aspect of their classrooms that couldn’t be completed without the emerging technology.
“I was glad to see there was an educator component and that educators have an opportunity to think about their role in this, not just supporting students who might apply,” said Jake Baskin, the executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association and a former computer science teacher in the Chicago public schools. “The value for educators especially is being able to see that this is something that they can engage with, despite it being technology that they might not be as familiar with.”
The challenge comes four months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that called for infusing AI throughout K-12 education, including training educators to incorporate it into their daily tasks and teaching students how to use it effectively. The order also required the creation of the Presidential AI Challenge.
As part of the Trump administration’s push for AI innovation, the U.S Department of Education added advancing the use of AI in education as one of its proposed priorities for discretionary grant programs, the agency announced in July.
The Presidential AI Challenge is “a nice way to avoid being top down and prescriptive about what people should be doing with AI, which it’s pretty early for,” said Jeremy Roschelle, the co-executive director of learning sciences research for the nonprofit Digital Promise.
Challenges like these are also opportunities for highlighting students’ and teachers’ creativity, Roschelle said. It can feature the positive tasks students are using AI for, which is “a counter story to the most common media story” that students are only using AI for cheating, he said.
Registration for the competition opened on Aug. 26. State champions will be announced in early 2026, with winners advancing to five regional competitions. National finalists will be invited to the White House for a three-day showcase in June 2026. National champions will receive $10,000, either for their school or per team member, along with other prizes.
The U.S. Department of Education is “fully aligned” with the challenge and is “encouraging students and educators to explore AI technologies with curiosity and with creativity,” said Secretary Linda McMahon during the AI task force meeting. “[AI is] not one of those things to be afraid of. Let’s embrace it. Let’s develop AI-based solutions to real-world problems and cultivate an AI-informed, future-ready workforce.”
So far, a lot of AI adoption in schools has been modest in scope, said Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. Her group studies districts that are using AI. The Presidential AI Challenge can promote more ambitious uses for the technology in education, she said.
“That’s what I’m hopeful about: that these kinds of initiatives at the national and state level can inspire bigger, bolder thinking about how AI, [generative] AI in particular, could be used to solve some of the problems that have been plaguing public education for so long,” she said.
But the United States faces some unique challenges in supporting that innovation in education to stay competitive with other countries, said Lake. That is why there is an important federal role in supporting this work, she added.
“The difference in the U.S. from so many of these other countries is that [our education system is] just highly, highly decentralized, and the Trump administration has made it clear that they’re deferring to states,” she said. “The trick here is we’ve got to figure out how to support AI nationally while realizing that it is going to be locally driven.”
Education cuts could hamper Trump’s AI push
The Trump administration’s AI plans come after it has made substantial cuts to K-12 education and research. For example, the administration terminated more than 400 federal grants in May that were aimed at advancing STEM education in K-12 schools and universities. In March, it eliminated the Education Department’s office of educational technology, which was tasked with aiding states and districts with implementing emerging technologies in schools. And in February, the administration canceled more than $900 million worth of Education Department contracts, many of which came from the department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It has previously defended the cuts as necessary to align federal programs with administration priorities, such as eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
While the challenge is a helpful step in encouraging innovation in AI and education, the Trump administration’s cuts to K-12 research could undermine its AI goals, said Lake.
“How will we learn from communities that are doing this experimentation?” she said. “It will be a huge missed opportunity if we don’t have knowledge sharing and some decently rigorous research connected to these experiments. And we do have a decimated federal research infrastructure right now. I think that, hopefully, the national government will rebuild that capacity and will do it quickly, especially around AI and these emerging technologies.”
While the challenge is an opportunity for students and teachers to deepen their understanding of AI, Baskin said, it’s not enough on its own. Teachers, he said, are more influential in sparking students’ interest in AI than a national award, and Baskin wants to see more funding for research and teacher training.
“What inspires students every day is a supported and engaged educator who is given the autonomy and ability to determine what their students need to succeed,” he said.
A competition also isn’t the best way to reach all students and teachers, especially those who are “not so inclined to explore this technology or who are resistant to using it,” Roschelle said.
“If you want to create AI literacy at a certain level for every single student and teacher in America, you can’t do that through a challenge,” Roschelle said. Ensuring AI literacy for all would also require teacher professional development and some kind of curriculum to reach all students, he said.
Some experts point out that one thing missing from the Trump administration’s push for AI in education is a discussion around safety and the technology’s potential effects on youth social-emotional and mental health.
“We’re seeing unfortunate news stories where AI has not been safe for students,” Roschelle said. “I’d really like to see nonprofits and industry come together around this challenge, but with an emphasis on what’s missing in it, which is how do we highlight safety, protection, privacy?”
