OAN Staff Jenna Lee
11:08 AM – Wednesday, June 10, 2026
First Lady Melania Trump hosted the inaugural Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge National Champion Awards ceremony on Tuesday, honoring the student winners.
Originally announced last August, the competition stems from President Donald Trump’s April 2025 executive order, “Advancing Intelligence for American Youth,” which directs federal agencies to expand educational initiatives, funding and resources aimed at boosting AI literacy, technology skills, and STEM education for students across the U.S.
“Today is about opening doors. When the doors open, passions flow, courage blossoms, and dreams are realized,” the First Lady said during the ceremony. “AI inspires. Use this chapter of your life to sail away with your dreams, to continue to build boldly and importantly, to safeguard America’s leading position in the world of technology.”
“As you know, technology supports every business sector today. You saw AI’s potential and created ideas that will shape America’s future in many areas, including healthcare, nutrition, public safety and beyond.”
The First Lady also noted the immense scale of the competition, which drew over 20,000 student participants from all 50 states, including the District of Columbia (D.C.), Puerto Rico and 49 U.S. military schools across 10 countries, according to the statement released by the White House on Tuesday.
President Trump’s executive order aims to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into U.S. classrooms by directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to prioritize federal funding for teacher and administrator training. The initiative focuses on embedding AI literacy across all subjects while helping educators leverage the technology to streamline their own administrative tasks.
Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, emphasized that the executive order “established the AI Education Task Force and inaugurated the Presidential AI Challenge with the first lady’s leadership and support.”
According to the White House, the competition challenged students to develop AI tools that solve local community problems, while prompting educators to find creative ways to integrate AI into K-12 classrooms. Teams of students utilized advanced AI tools — including “robotics, decision trees, large language models, neural networks and computer vision” — to build websites or phone apps aimed at solving local issues.
Beyond national recognition, the six student National Champion teams were awarded a robust package of incentives designed to fuel their ongoing technical education. Each winning student received a Presidential Certificate of Achievement signed by the First Lady, alongside substantial cloud computing credits to further develop their software. The honors culminated in a $10,000 grand prize check presented to each team to support their future academic and entrepreneurial pursuits in the field of artificial intelligence.
In the elementary school track, top honors went to the “Homework Helper” project developed by Aaron Gallagher, Ayden Taverna, Emma Connor, and Ryker Cochran of Alcoa Intermediate School in Tennessee, alongside the “Friendzone Chatbot Bullying Prevention App,” created by Aldie, Virginia community group members Riva Madda, Aarna Jaiswal, Eshani Khatri, Sanuli Rathnayake, and Samitha Pinnamareddy.
The middle school division celebrated “SkillUp” — a platform engineered by Viha Iyer, Arya Pratap, and Shrimayi Shetty of Washington’s NorthStar Middle School — as well as an innovative urban planning model designed to detect municipal blight using street-view imagery, developed independently by Shan Vance of Julia Landon College Preparatory School in Florida.
High school innovations were led by two sophisticated individual projects: Khandakar Mahin of Pennsylvania’s Upper Darby Senior High School, who utilized computer vision for hotel room identification in criminal investigations, and Alexander Du of North Allegheny High School, who engineered “IRIS,” a low-cost spatiotemporal AI framework designed to aid visually impaired navigation in complex urban environments.
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