Surrey Youth AI Summit: A One-Day, No-Code AI Competition for High-School Students

A one-day competition where high-schoolers with no coding experience formed teams, built a working website or chatbot for a business, and pitched it to industry judges.

Role: Co-Founder & Lead Organizer · Timeline: Spring 2026 → held June 23, 2026 · Stack/Tools: Google Antigravity + Vercel (website), Google Forms, Discord, Canva, Claude Cowork; student build tools: ChatGPT, Bolt, Lovable, Chatbase

• ~70 students from 14 schools (13 in Surrey, 1 from Abbotsford) attended the first youth AI summit in Surrey, with 81 registered through a managed accept and waitlist system.
• $650 in funding, two scholarships, professional judges, and a keynote from Dr. Peter Ostafichuk, a UBC Professor of Teaching, a 2023 Engineers Canada Medal for Distinction recipient, and a co-founder of Generation AI, plus donated food from Fresh Street Market.
• Marketing funnel that held end to end: 22,062 views → 4,227 accounts reached → 64 link taps → 81 sign-ups, with the five summit reels pulling ~13,500 views.

The Problem

High-school students curious about AI had no hands-on way to actually build with it. The events that existed for students were lectures and panels, where you watched and didn't make anything. Nothing in Surrey let a complete beginner show up and leave the same day with a working tool a real business could use. The people who could build with these tools were a small minority, and the skill wasn't spreading.

My Role

Built and owned the event website and registration system, the Generation AI sponsorship and speaker relationship, the program (three tool workshops, five business-case briefs, a 100-point judging rubric, the scholarship mechanism, and the certificates), the Instagram marketing, and day-of operations. Supporting contributions: Yuvraj Bains (co-founder, Panorama Ridge) led inter-school outreach and the Bolt workshop; Generation AI provided judges, mentors, $650 in funding, and the keynote; Ms. Stusiak was faculty sponsor and a judge; Fresh Street Market donated food.

Key Decisions

Keeping the judging credible. The challenge: in a student-run competition, the fastest way to lose everyone's trust is for it to look like the organizers' friends won. Options considered: exec or peer grading (rejected as a direct conflict of interest); deciding winners by a student vote (rejected, because it turns into a popularity contest and is easy to game). What was chosen: Generation AI's four judges plus a teacher scored every team on a printed 100-point rubric, science-fair style; organizers scored nothing, and the student vote was moved to a separate People's Choice award. The tradeoff was giving up all control over who won, which is exactly what made the result impossible to call rigged.

Accepting more students than the room held. The challenge: 81 sign-ups, a room with a hard cap, and a free event on the first days of summer break, where a large share of people flake. Options considered: accept exactly to the cap (rejected, because no-shows would leave the room half-empty); first-come-first-served with no buffer (rejected, same problem). What was chosen: over-accept against expected no-shows, 50 accepted and 30 waitlisted, with the waitlist as backfill. That buffer is why there was room to take in every student who showed up on the day, and why the important information moved onto an Instagram post, a second contact field on the forms, and certificate delivery through the post-event survey.

Leading outreach with a real website instead of a poster. The challenge: getting 20–25 schools to send students to an unproven, student-run event is hard when the pitch is a paragraph in an email. Options considered: a poster and a Google Form, which is what most school events use (rejected, because it looks amateur and converts poorly); long explanatory emails (rejected as slow and easy to ignore). What was chosen: a real website built with Google Antigravity and deployed on Vercel, with the sign-up form, FAQ, and full details in one place, so every outreach message became "here's the link." The tradeoff was upfront build time for something that made the event look legitimate and made every conversation faster.

The Solution

The core of the day was a workshop → build → pitch loop. Three hands-on workshops (ChatGPT, Bolt, and Chatbase) got total beginners up to speed, then each team got a real business brief and about three hours to build a working website or chatbot, then pitched it to the judges. (See: group photo; live site, surreyaisummit.vercel.app.)

Each team was randomly assigned one of five detailed business briefs: Hazelnut Café & Bakery, BrightPath Tutoring, Fern & Foliage Plant Shop, Spice Route Food Truck, and Fade Theory Barbershop. Every brief had the backstory, customer personas, brand voice, a facts table, and a 20–25 question customer FAQ, but no prescribed solution, so teams had to decide for themselves whether to build a website, a chatbot, or both. (See: business brief documents.)

Results & Impact

~70 students from 14 schools (13 in Surrey, 1 from Abbotsford) attended; 81 registered (50 accepted, 30 waitlisted, 1 rejected). The marketing funnel held end to end: 22,062 views → 4,227 accounts reached → 64 link taps → 81 sign-ups → ~70 attended, with the five summit reels pulling ~13,500 views and the recap alone hitting ~3.2K in its first four days. The $650 sponsorship came through in full and was held until it cleared before any purchases, with receipts kept for the sponsor; two scholarships and cash prizes ($200/$140/$100) went out, and every participant received six volunteer hours and a digital certificate.

In the post-event survey, most students named the keynote as the best part of the day.

What I Learned

• On a volunteer team, nothing is done until it's confirmed done. So I stopped assuming, built buffer time into every deadline, and put a single owner on anything that couldn't be allowed to slip.
• One channel that can fail silently should never be the only way something important gets through. I now run a backup path for anything that has to arrive.
• Credibility compounds: a real website, receipts kept clean, and judging I didn't control each removed a separate reason for someone to doubt the event, and together they did more than any single one would have.

What Came Next

The most durable outcome was the Generation AI relationship: what started as one sponsorship became a partnership both sides want to run again, with a second edition as the next step. The Summit grew out of the AI & Innovation Club and extended that work from a single school to the region.