From hands-on AI literacy challenges to global competitions and project showcases, AIYA Events give students opportunities to experience AI directly, collaborate with peers, solve real-world problems, and turn ideas into action.

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Three tentpole events anchor our experiential programming throughout the year. Each AIYA Season kicks off with AIYA Literacy Week in the fall, followed by the AIYA Global Hackathon in the spring, and culminating with the AIYA Impact Symposium at the end of the year.​

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1. AIYA Literacy Week​​​

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AIYA Literacy Week enables students to gain essential perspectives on AI by solving hands-on puzzles and challenges in a workshop format.​

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AIYA Literacy Week is the annual workshop that kicks-off AIYA Chapter activities every year. It is an invitation to AIYA members and the wider community to participate in structured AI experiences that build fundamental AI literacy and practical AI skills, and consists of a week-long series of AI exercises and activities designed to provide participants with critical, direct experience and insight.

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Solve​​​ hands-on puzzles and challenges that enable you to gain perspectives essential to maintain cognitive agency, critical autonomy, and genuine authorship while consuming and using AI,

 

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2. AIYA Global Hackathon​​​

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The AIYA Global AI Hackathon is an intensive, collaborative event that pushes students' AI skills in a competitive, time-constrained environment.​

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The AIYA Global Hackathon focuses on building real-world solutions using AI. Since this is an international event utilizing, the format is asynchronous to accommodate participants across multiple time zones. The goals of the event are to foster collaboration, encourage high-level problem-solving, and demonstrate the effectiveness of AI application under pressure, allowing flexible participation regardless of location.

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The AIYA Global Hackathon centers around two competitive components:​

• Apps, Agents, & Workflows: Teams conceive, design, and build functional projects using AI within the dedicated timeframe. Projects will revolve around creating a web or mobile application that solves a specific problem using AI.​​

• Modeling & Simulations: Focus on the technical development and optimization of predictive models (e.g., classification → generalization → prediction) of complex phenomena to address a provided challenge using data provided.

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3. AIYA Impact Symposium​​​

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The AIYA Impact Symposium is dedicated to showcasing independent student projects as well as the findings of AIYA working groups.​

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The goal of the AIYA Impact Symposium is to foster agency in learning by leveraging AI as an effective cognitive partner to broaden the scope of inquiry, accelerate iteration, and amplify creativity and impact while preserving essential cognitive and critical effort. Participants' projects are published through the AIYA website and social channels with accompanying student videos. Outstanding submissions will be presented as part of the AIYA Impact Symposium. Participants are encouraged to take on ambitious projects that demonstrate their learning and use of AI. 

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Projects must actively use AI for one or more key phases: framing, planning, research, hypothesis/thesis formulation, modeling, validation/disconfirmation of results or as the direct subject of the project itself.

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The AIYA Impact Symposium welcomes submissions in three project categories:​

• Creative Writing: Using generative AI to assist in drafting, world-building, or plot-testing novels, scripts, or poetry.​

• Research: Applying AI to analyze data, simulate complex systems, or accelerate the literature review process.​

• Entrepreneurship/Social Impact: Developing and implementing actionable solutions for real-world business and community problems.​​

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