COLUMBIANA, Ohio – Two students from Heartland Christian School have been named the state champions in the 2026 Presidential AI Challenge, a nationwide K-12 competition.
Evan Stambaugh and Brody Conaway, competing in High School Track II (Technical – Built AI Technology), developed an AI-powered system, “AI-Powered Personalized Family Communications: Connecting Every Classroom to Every Home.” The project was supervised by Elijah Stambaugh, HCS chief academic officer and founder of Refining Education and Creator-Class.
The students’ system aims to address the challenge of personalized parent communication in K-12 education. Teachers spend an estimated two to three hours a week crafting individualized communications. Generic mass communication, meanwhile, fails to give families meaningful insight into their child’s learning. The result is a widening gap between classroom and home.
Rather than building a chatbot or conceptual demo, the team engineered a production-ready automation pipeline that generates personalized communication at scale with zero additional teacher workload. Google’s Gemini large language model processes classroom information carefully with engineered system and user prompts. AI generates communication that is emailed to each family automatically.
The architecture leverages several advanced AI concepts, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation, vector database embeddings for semantic search and context engineering, which is the discipline of managing what information enters the AI’s context window to maximize output quality. The team also demonstrated skill-based composability, building reusable workflow modules that can be swapped and scaled as new tools emerge.
The framework the students built extends beyond parent communication. The context-plus-automation architecture can power individualized progress reports, differentiated learning plans and adaptive student activities and lays the groundwork for what Stambaugh calls an “educator operating system” where AI amplifies teacher expertise rather than replacing it.
As Ohio champions, the team advances to the East Central Regional Competition on April 13, with regional winners announced April 16. National champions will be announced in June.
“Three months before this project, these students had never built anything with AI,” Elijah Stambaugh said. “They didn’t just learn to use AI tools – they learned the math and science behind how AI works, then applied it to solve a real problem in their own community. That’s exactly what this challenge was designed to do.”
Pictured at top: Brody Conaway, Elijah Stambaugh and Evan Stambaugh.