Newman Elementary fourth-graders Ayansh Srivastava and Arunavya Satyam, together with Anay Kumar, a second-grader from Andover, make up “Bay State Brains” — a team of AI solution-seekers whose “Lost and Found” app won the 2026 Presidential AI Challenge State Championships.
“It was just a normal day, getting ready for dinner, and then my mom looked at her phone, she got a notification, and BOOM it said we won Massachusetts AI Competition,” Anay recounted during a meet-up at the Srivastava home.
It was Anay’s dad who first came across the opportunity. Having done his post-doctoral research at Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, he learned the Institute was co-facilitating the Presidential Challenge. The Srivastavas and Satyams, family friends, jumped at the chance to form a team.
“We were wanting to expose the kids to something like this, and this just was [the] right time,” Ayansh’s mom, Anumeha, said.
The Presidential Challenge, set by First Lady Melania Trump in August 2025, is part of the Executive Order issued in April 2025 to advance AI education and solutions among K-12 students and educators. Youth participants across the nation complete projects that involve the study, development, or use of AI methods and tools that address real-world problems.
Projects require research and creative thinking in one of two categories: Track 1, where students develop in-depth proposals spotlighting AI solutions, or the more technical Track 2, where students build functional AI solutions. Teams earn points for their project’s relevance to the community, relevance to the president and administration, research or technical implementation, development, use of AI, originality and presentation quality.
Ayansh, Aru and Anay’s “Lost and Found” app, designed to help students locate lost items with minimal effort, fell into the Track 2 category.
“We noticed that a lot of kids at school lose their stuff, and if you’re like a kindergartener, you might not have the guts to go to, like, the Lost and Found area of the school,” Aru said.
App users can upload images of items they have lost (which, in the YouTube demo, features everything from candles to water bottles to family members), and search the app’s database for a match.
The project was as much a family effort as it was an effort from the “Bay State Brains,” with parents lending their skills to help code and create the app. Ayansh’s father, Vivek, was the team’s official mentor. The three students were honest about their families’ assistance throughout the project, which Anumeha noted was received well by judges given the team’s age.
Amazon Bedrock and AWS Lambda, functions of Amazon Web Services (which Ayansh describes as a “borrowed computer brain”), made the app’s coding and construction free and fast.
Along the way, the “Bay State Brains” learned an important lesson: AI makes mistakes.
“Normally, when people think of AI they think … ‘It’s pretty good. I really don’t see it making that many mistakes,’” Ayansh said. “But in reality, when you start off, it makes so many mistakes.”
“We really had to look carefully at our work,” he added. “Because if there was an error [with] the end product, it’ll be very hard to remove it. It might be there for a while because there’s so much code … It’s like trying to find one writing error in the whole entire essay.”
The state champions will now turn their attention to the regional championships — and, if all goes well, nationals.
“I was pretty excited [that we won], but also I knew that we still had a long way to go,” Ayansh said.
The team recently survived the first interview of their lives from a panel of judges for the regional championships. “If you have any more questions, just ask us, because we already went through the hard part of the interview,” Anay noted.
During the presentation, Aru acted as the “convincer” (explaining the app’s benefits and how to download it), Anay as the “introducer” and Ayansh as the “explainer.”
The “Bay State Brains” will learn April 21 if they succeeded at a regional level. If so, their next stop will be the National Championship in June 2026, and a potential trip to the White House.
“I was excited, but then at the same time, I was, like, nervous, because if we did make it to nationals we have to, like, go to the White House, and that would be kind of scary and cool,” said Aru.
Although they have already won presidential certificates of achievement and access to special web-based resources, prize money is reserved for national champions. If they succeed in the National Championship, “Bay State Brains” will receive $10,000.
The team already has plans for the prize money.
“I would probably spend it a little bit on donating, [and] you know, toys,” Anay said. Ayansh agreed, saying he would buy “stuff I like” and set some aside for charity. Aru has bigger dreams.
“I’d go to Florida, or I’d go somewhere else, like maybe Ireland,” she said.
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