Artificial intelligence is the subject where the gap between an expensive programme and a good one is widest. Search for an AI summer programme and you will find courses charging thousands of dollars, marketed with the names of universities that have nothing to do with them. Meanwhile the strongest opportunities in the field cost nothing, and one of them will pay for your flight.
The students who do well here tend to build something specific rather than attend something famous. Aikhan from Kyrgyzstan co-invented the first AI assistant that supports the Kyrgyz language, had it patented at home, and went to Princeton to study computer science and linguistics. Alba from Galicia built her Yale application around preserving Galician, a language at risk of disappearing, using the tools of the field. Pawanphat from Thailand went to NYU Abu Dhabi after a Kode With Klossy scholarship and a run of projects that connected AI to healthcare.
Below are fourteen ways in. Ten are free, three cost money and earn it, and one has a team fee with aid attached.
Competitions
International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence
The newest of the international science olympiads and already the largest event in school-level AI. The 2026 edition in Astana drew 466 contestants from 108 countries and territories, competing in national teams of up to four across scientific rounds and a team challenge. You join through your country's national selection, run by a recognised national body, and you must be 20 or younger on July 1 of the competition year. The 2027 olympiad is in Singapore from July 4 to 10, hosted by AI Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. Teams pay a fee, which in 2026 ran from €1,550 to €2,600 for a team of five covering accommodation and full board, and a financial aid committee waives the fee and supports travel for teams that need it. If your country is new to science olympiads there is a parallel entry route called GAITE, designed to be easier to enter and capped at five years per country.
MIT Battlecode
Free, genuinely run by MIT as part of its January term, and the most fun entry on this list. You write an autonomous player, a bot that commands an army in a live strategy game, then watch it fight other people's bots through laddered tournaments across January. There is a dedicated High School Tournament for teams made up entirely of school students, and an International Qualifier for teams with at least one member outside the US, so your nationality is built into the structure rather than a problem to solve. The prize pool passes $20,000. The 2026 edition ran through January, and the 2027 dates should follow.
Wharton Global High School Data Science Competition
Free, run by the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, and open to school teams worldwide, with students from 48 countries in the last round. Teams of three to five from the same school, with a teacher as advisor, get a dataset and build models and a written analysis from it. Last year's data was simulated ice hockey. There are no cash prizes, which is worth knowing upfront: you get trophies, certificates, and free enrolment in a Wharton youth programme for the winners. Registration for the last cycle ran from December to late January.
Teens in AI Global Techathon
Free, for ages 13 to 18 anywhere, and designed for people with no AI experience at all. The cycle runs from January to April in four phases: an inspiration week, a bootcamp week, local design sprints, then the global techathon weekend itself, held around International Women's Day in March, and a demo day in April. Projects are built against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It was founded by Elena Sinel and launched at the UN's AI for Good Summit.
Global Hack Week
Major League Hacking runs themed week-long virtual hackathons through the year, and they are free for anyone anywhere aged 13 and up, with parental permission under 18. Each week combines workshops, live sessions and building something small. It is the lowest-commitment way to start: no application, no selection, no fee. Hacktoberfest runs October 9 to 15, 2026 and Builders Week November 6 to 12, so the next one is three weeks away.
Technovation Girls
Free, worldwide, for girls and gender-expansive students aged 8 to 18 in beginner, junior and senior divisions. Teams work with a mentor to build an AI or mobile app product that solves a community problem, with a business plan behind it. The season runs from August to submissions in April, judging through May and June, and finalists pitching at a World Summit. Virtual and international teams are allowed, which matters if there is no chapter where you live.
Free programs
PAIR, the Program on AI and Reasoning
The single best-value item on this list. Ten days in a sixteenth-century country house in Somerset, England, for about 30 students aged 16 to 20 from any country, on how reasoning works in both human and artificial minds. Tuition, meals and lodging are free, and the organisers say they are usually able to cover students' travel costs in full, with airport pickup for minors travelling internationally. You need basic programming. It ran in late August in 2026, and it is run by FABRIC, a non-profit based in Prague.
Non-trivial
A free online research programme for students aged 14 to 20 anywhere who have not started university, and the closest thing to a free version of the paid AI research programmes below. You start with a four-week research foundations course, and strong participants move up to fellowships with mentorship and project grants, then to scholars awards worth $10,000 each. More than $400,000 has been awarded since 2022. There is no fee to apply and no fee to take part. The 2027 priority deadline is December 15, 2026, with a final deadline of January 4, 2027.
Research Science Institute
The most selective free research programme in the world, six weeks at MIT for about 100 students a year, roughly a third of them from outside the United States, and cost-free to students. You do original research with a mentor and present it at the end. It is for students in their penultimate year of school, so seniors are too late. International students apply through a nominating agency in their own country rather than directly, so the first thing to check is whether your country participates.
Girls Who Code Pathways
Free, virtual and year-round for girls and non-binary students in grades 9 to 12, with applications accepted from students around the world. You pick a track, and the relevant ones here are AI and Society, and Data Science and AI, then work through self-paced projects of three to six hours each and finish with a certificate and something you built. The autumn 2026 programme runs from October 19 to December 4.
Kode With Klossy
Free two-week coding camps for young women and gender-expansive teens aged 13 to 18, with no experience required. The machine learning track has you train a chatbot in Python; other tracks cover data visualisation and web development. The camps are held virtually for scholars globally, alongside in-person sessions that in 2026 included London as well as US cities. This is the programme Pawanphat did before NYU Abu Dhabi.
Programs that cost money
Stanford AI4ALL
Genuinely Stanford, run by its Institute for Human-Centered AI with Pre-Collegiate Studies, and unusual in being open only to students currently in grade 9. Two weeks, either online at $4,120 or residential at Stanford for $9,800, plus a $60 application fee that can be waived. Need-based aid is limited but explicitly open to international participants as well as domestic ones. The 2026 deadline was in early February.
Algoverse AI Research
Twelve weeks online in teams of three or four with a mentor, at $3,325 including the compute you need, with need-based scholarships prioritising families under $70,000 a year. Open to school students internationally, and Python is required. The mentors are the reason to consider it: the published list includes researchers at Meta FAIR, Google DeepMind, Stanford Medicine, UCSD and Cornell Tech. One thing to read carefully before you pay. The programme advertises high acceptance rates at NeurIPS, ICML and ACL, and those are workshop tracks, which are a much lower bar than the main conference. The venues are genuine and so are the submissions; the framing is inflated. Spring 2027 cohorts start on January 17, February 14 and March 14.
Wolfram High School Summer Research Program
Two and a half weeks in Massachusetts building a computational project with mentors from Wolfram Research, with Stephen Wolfram himself meeting students on project selection. It costs $5,500 including room and board and a year of Wolfram technology, and the aid is the important part: need-based support covers up to 90 percent of the cost and admission is need-blind, though aid excludes travel and the deposit. Open to students aged 14 to 17 worldwide, and international students arrange their own visas.
Start your own journey
The nearest thing on this list is free and needs no application: Global Hack Week's Hacktoberfest starts October 9. After that, Non-trivial's priority deadline is December 15 and Battlecode runs through January.
If your country has no national AI olympiad team yet, that is a gap you could close rather than a door that is shut. Aikhan built an AI assistant for a language that did not have one. The work that stands out in this field tends to start that way.
Kai, the Borderless AI college counselor, works out which of these your age and country qualify you for, keeps the deadlines in one place, and helps you turn a project into an application an admissions reader can follow. It is free to use.
Start with Kai, and read the stories from students who did it.
