Contest OVerview
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Design Contest consists of four activities that student design teams each complete. These activities scale with the complexity of the challenge, guiding students through the process of designing an AI smart energy management system using analysis of their own real home data.
Student design teams familiarize themselves with concepts that relate home electricity use to the evaluation of power usage and energy consumption. Then, they learn how to manually measure the power usage of appliances/devices found in their home, proceeding to (1) establish a home power schedule and (2) calculate the individual contributions of their devices to total home energy consumption. They learn how to graph and interpret this data with respect to establishing new goals for the overall performance of all their home devices as part of a specific home scenario. Then, teams establish and graph a new power usage schedule that meets these design goals. Finally, students model a system of conditions that their AI system would use to implement smart energy management. Each team will synthesize what they have discovered to create (1) an executive summary of their findings and (2) a video presentation of their design process.
CONTEST PROCEDURES
- Student design teams and their mentor are added via email address to a unique channel (Microsoft Teams) or folder (Google Drive) in the PTC Contest Microsoft Team or Google Drive. Students are encouraged to collaborate on all contest activities by working within their team’s unique, editable Activity documents that are provided over these virtual platforms. If teams are having access issues, the Activity documents can be downloaded from the top of each activity page on this website (MS Contest Activities from the website’s navigation menu).
- Student design teams kick off the contest with Activity 1, in which they complete background reading, choose a team name, assigning each member a team role, and arranging their weekly virtual meeting with their contest mentor via Zoom of Microsoft Teams.
- Over the next 6 weeks, design complete contest activities 2–4, with 2 weeks to complete each activity. For support in completing the activities, design teams can message or arrange meetings with their mentor through their team channel in Microsoft Teams, or using the Mentor Communications Doc in Google Drive. The design teams must check in with their mentors (1) during the weekly scheduled virtual meeting, and (2) for a formal review of their work prior to submitting each activity.
- To submit completed activity documents, the quality engineer of the design team will follow instructions to use the submission link provided (1) at the bottom of each activity document, (2) at the top of each activity page of the website, or (3) in the navigation menu of the website (“Activity Submissions”). Submissions are collected through a Qualtrics survey that prompts submission of all necessary activity components. The quality engineer will receive a confirmation email that their activity has been submitted.
