aiLearning Challenge · For schools

No school walks in alone.

A Challenge is not a date a school turns up to. It is an accompaniment that starts weeks before and continues after it. This page says what a participating school receives, and what it is being asked to commit — with the numbers, because a school cannot say yes to a commitment that has no size.

What the school receives

Preparation for your educator mentors

A programme the Lab runs and accompanies, with its material. Not a talk: the educators run a whole Challenge as a team, sit a real defence, and practise the decisions they will have to make in the room — including the line that separates accompanying from doing the work. An educator who has never opened a generative tool is admitted, deliberately.

Practice sessions with your students, before the event

The Challenge Gym: short sessions, unscored and non-qualifying, run on decoy tasks deliberately unrelated to the edition theme, so no team meets the format for the first time when the clock starts — and nothing from practice can leak into an entry. The Gym material stays open and free to any school.

The school kit

What a Challenge is and is not; the consent and safeguarding instruments ready to use; the tool standard; the roles and the mentor boundary; the full cycle; how work is judged; and the readiness checklist a school uses to know whether it is ready.

Accompaniment during and after

Someone at the Lab for your local coordination, each team’s profile returned as formative feedback, the public showcase of what was made, and the edition’s honest research report — including the results that did not come out.

What the school commits

Two kinds of number appear below and they behave differently. A floor is a line nobody goes under: a site that cannot meet it does not run that tier. A normal value is what a site does unless it has a reason; it is exceeded freely, and going under it is recorded, never a breach.

Educator preparation, per adult floor: at least 24 hours of contact plus about 6.5 asynchronous, roughly 30–31 hours in all Normally 6 sessions — 2 full days and 4 half-days — over 5 weeks, and finished at least 2 weeks before the site’s first Gym session, which is itself a floor. The hours hold for a cohort of 12–18 in three teams of 4–6: four instruments scale per person, so the commitment runs to about 19 hours at 8 and about 33 at 24.
Gym sessions before an edition normally: primary 6 · middle 5 · high 4 · university 3 Sessions run 20 to 45 minutes. The floor underneath is coverage: every signature mechanic and both gate moments rehearsed at least once, and never fewer than 3 sessions.
Supervision — prepared adults to participants floor: primary 1:6 · middle 1:12 · high 1:18 · university 1:24 The ratio counts only adults on the site’s preparation roster. An adult who is not on it may supervise for safety and nothing else, and counts toward no ratio. Never fewer than two adults wherever a participant who is a minor is present, whatever the arithmetic gives.

What the school puts in is its people’s time, space and connectivity. What it gets back does not depend on winning: educator capability that outlasts the edition, the Gym material free to any school, each team’s profile as formative feedback, and the edition’s research report.

Registration

Private schools register with a contribution of US$100; a school that cannot cover it may request a waiver. Public schools register free of charge.

What is not decided yet

The first edition is scheduled for Saturday 28 November 2026 and several things are genuinely still open. They are listed rather than filled with plausible answers:

The registration route and deadline, the named site safeguarding lead, the data controller and the retention period.
How many venues and localities the first edition runs.
The academic partner named in the research consent.
The minimum number of members in a team. The maximum is 6.

The school kit (PDF, Spanish) The full brief The pedagogical foundation

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