Dates

December 1st 2025 - December 21st 2025

Eligibility

All bay area high school students

Submission Requirements

  1. Expository video
    • Must include your name(s) but DO NOT include your school name(s)
    • Must include the division you are participating in (into or advanced)
  2. A 1-page report that must describe the problem you tried to solve, your dataset, the model(s) you used, and results
    • You may include other relavent information for your project
  3. Link to GitHub repo with ALL of the code for your project
    • We should be able to run the program if we want to

Important Notes:

  • DO NOT include your school name(s) in any submition material to prevent bias during judging
  • Consequences for including school names could be deductions or disqualification

Prizes (for some reason it says $5000 in cash ~ we need to fix that, this is untrue)

Over $5000 in prizes and other opportunities provided by our sponsors will be awarded.

Judging Criteria

Category

Description

# of points

Impact

Does this project help solve a specific problem that affects people in the Bay Area?

10 pts

Originality

Is this project relatively novel/unique?

5 pts

Code

  • Data Preprocessing: Is the dataset chosen appropriate for the problem you are trying to solve?


  • Models: Does you train and optimize their own model or use a pretrained model? Transfer learning is completely fine, but just loading a pretrained model without modifying it at all is strongly discouraged and may be penalized.


  • Metrics: Do you use accurate metrics to assess the performance of the model? Is the performance of the model decent? If the model accuracy is poor is there a good reason for why their model performed poorly? Can you explain any ways to improve performance in the future


  • Integration: Does the participant integrate their AI model to a usable interface so that it can be used by your target audience?

20 pts total: 5 pts for each category

Video/Report

Are the video and report well made and professional? Do they accurately describe the project and include all of the necessary information?

5 pts
   

40 pts total

Winner Selection (TBD)

  1. Monta Vista AI Club officers will choose the top 15 projects from each division, which score highest on the judging rubric above, and send them to our sponsors
  2. The sponsors will then choose their top 3 projects from each division which will receive a sponsor award and the according prize
  3. Winners will be announced on January 12th 2026