Calgary high school students compete in finals of national AI challenge

While more and more people start dabbling with AI tools, some Calgary teens have already completed impressive work with it.

Some Calgary teens are showcasing some impressive work using artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Ten teams from across the country competed at the University of Calgary Friday for the 2025 National High School Big Data and AI Challenge Finals, with projects aimed at tackling serious problems including youth suicides, teen drug use, and school shootings.

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“Oftentimes (people) interpret AI as a cheating device, but we really got to explore how it can be useful and prevalent in today’s society,” said Vanessa Wang, a finalist and Grade 12 student at Westmount Charter School.

Students presented their ideas to combat social inequities by using AI tools and open data sets to target areas of concern.

“It streamlines it so much, and it just makes everything a little bit more efficient,” said Prakhar Mishra, a finalist in his senior year at Westmount Charter.

Many students had rarely used artificial intelligence before, so they spent the past few months learning advanced AI tools for their projects.

“I really had zero experience, but I still found it pretty easy to understand it. We used AI in order to understand different software. That definitely helped a lot because it made it a lot more digestible,” said 17-year-old finalist Elaine Wang.

The top teams will win cash, but all of the students’ abstracts will be published.

“Having a publication in high school is a very rare thing, so we’re really giving them a step forward to advance their academic career,” said Vikram Arora, STEM Fellowship chief operating officer.

The teens’ research will also go to the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and may help guide policy.

“I think we’ve come a long way in terms of how you harness the power of AI and computer science in solving real-world challenges,” said Aditya Shekhar Nittala, a judge from the University of Calgary’s computer science department.

The competition is organized by STEM Fellowship, a national charitable organization focused on data science, AI, and scientific communication.

“The use of AI these students are doing is well beyond high school, even well beyond what most university students are doing at this time, so it really highlights the importance of self-directed learning but how youth and people who are specifically passionate about this topic are able to achieve such great projects,” said Arora.