Coding, AI, and robotics programs for students building serious tech projects before senior year.
Programs in this collection (8)
USA Computing Olympiad: USACO. Competition, Worldwide. Free online programming contests held four times a year in Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum divisions, with promotion based on scores. About two dozen top students are invited to a summer training camp at Clemson University, where four are picked to represent the USA at the IOI.
Beaver Works Summer Institute: MIT Lincoln Lab. Summer Program, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Four-week summer STEM program at MIT for rising high school seniors living in the U.S., with project courses in areas such as autonomous systems, programming, microelectronics and cybersecurity. Students take an online course before applying. Free for families under $200,000; others pay $3,000.
Technovation Girls: Technovation. Competition, Worldwide. A free program in which girls and nonbinary and gender non-conforming youth ages 8 to 18 form teams of 1 to 5, choose a community problem and build an AI or mobile app to address it. The season runs from August to May, and teams are placed in Beginner, Junior or Senior divisions by the age of the oldest member. Junior and Senior teams also make a technical video and a user adoption plan or business plan.
Junior Academy: New York Academy of Sciences. Fellowship, Worldwide. A free online program of the New York Academy of Sciences in which students ages 13 to 17 join international teams and work with STEM expert mentors to solve real-world challenges. Each challenge is a 10-week virtual competition, held from mid-September to mid-November in the fall or mid-February to mid-April in the spring. Students who complete a challenge receive a certificate and a Young Membership to the Academy, and there is no travel.
International Olympiad in Informatics: IOI. Competition, Worldwide. An annual international programming olympiad in which secondary school students compete individually, solving a set of informatics problems over two competition days. Each country typically sends a delegation of four contestants and two accompanying adults, headed by a delegation leader. Contestants must be students no older than twenty on July 1 of the competition year. In the U.S., USACO picks the four team members at its summer training camp.
Congressional App Challenge: US Congress. Competition, USA. District-level coding competition run by members of Congress, open to high school students in participating districts, with winning apps displayed in the U.S. Capitol. Students register and submit themselves, but only if their Member of Congress has signed up the district; 2026 entries are due October 26, 2026.
picoCTF (CyLab Security Academy): Carnegie Mellon. Competition, Worldwide. Carnegie Mellon's free capture-the-flag program where players solve jeopardy-style puzzles by reverse engineering, hacking, and decrypting to find hidden flags. Teams of up to five enter the annual competition, and picoGym practice is open year-round.
CyberPatriot: Air & Space Forces Association. Competition, USA. Teams of two to six students with a registered adult coach get virtual operating systems and must find and fix security weaknesses while keeping critical services running. After online rounds, top teams earn all-expenses-paid trips to the National Finals in Maryland.