COLUMBIANA — Two students from Heartland Christian School (HCS) have been named the Official Ohio State Champions in the 2026 Presidential AI Challenge (PAIC), a nationwide K-12 competition launched under the President’s Executive Order 14277 to advance artificial intelligence education for American youth.

Evan Stambaugh and Brody Conaway, competing in High School Track II (Technical — Built AI Technology), developed a fully functional AI-powered system titled The project was supervised by Elijah Stambaugh, Chief Academic Officer at HCS and founder of Refining Education and Creator-Class.

Personalized parent communication is one of the most persistent challenges in K-12 education. Teachers spend an estimated two to three hours a week crafting individualized communications. That is time most educators simply don’t have. 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. The AI generates a unique communication that is emailed to each family automatically.

The architecture leverages several advanced AI concepts including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), 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 well beyond parent communication. The same 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 State Champions, the team now advances to the East Central Regional Competition on April 13, with regional winners announced April 16. National champions will be announced in June, with the possibility of representing Ohio in Washington, D.C.

“Three months before this project, these students had never built anything with AI,” said Elijah Stambaugh. “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.”