Competition Background

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the landscape of education, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance teaching, learning, and assessment. While much attention has focused on the implications of AI for students, there is an equally vital need to empower educators to harness these technologies creatively and critically. In higher education, where the pursuit of innovation is integral to improving the student experience and advancing pedagogy, AI presents a frontier that is both exciting and uncertain. There is an urgent need to move beyond passive adaptation to AI tools and instead cultivate a culture of active experimentation—one in which educators lead the exploration of AI’s potential to support deeper learning, foster creativity, and improve assessment practices.

To address this need, DI-IDEA, in association with Camtree, the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, is launching a new competition for teachers in higher education: a challenge designed to inspire innovative thinking and practical experimentation with AI in teaching, learning, and assessment. This competition aims to surface and share cutting-edge ideas, while encouraging educators to reflect critically on how AI can enhance the human dimensions of education. By fostering a spirit of inquiry and collaboration, the competition will help build a community of practice that champions responsible and imaginative uses of AI in higher education, ensuring that the sector shapes AI’s development in ways that align with its core values of academic rigour, equity, and student success. Educational applications of technologies, including, but not limited to: Generative AI and other AI; knowledge graphs; virtual and augmented reality; immersive or ‘smart’ environments; big data sets; wearable computing; and the ‘internet of things’.

The competition is open to individuals or teams working in any higher education context or disciplinary setting. Entries may involve the application of existing technologies in novel contexts or the development of new technologies to address an educational challenge. What is essential, however, is that the project involves not just a ‘vision’ or a ‘demonstration’ of the potential of AI in education, but reports on its implementation and evaluation in an authentic educational setting.

Eligibility and Scope

1.Participants must hold teaching roles in higher education institution (university or college) which may be academic, vocational, or preprofessional in character.

2.While teams may include non-teaching staff (e.g. working in teaching support, learning technology development, library and learning resources) the team lead must have a teaching responsibility. Postgraduate students who are involved in teaching are eligible for entry

3.While the team composition may change between registration and submission of entries, the team leader cannot be changed.

Nature of Entries

The competition is intended to promote innovation and inquiry that will enhance learner experience and improve learning outcomes. 

As such, entries should both:

• present novel approaches developed to address genuine educational challenges or problems, or provide new teaching, learning and assessment opportunities (the innovations)

• present evidence of systematic exploration of the outcomes of these innovations being deployed in authentic learning environments such as classrooms, laboratories, museums, workshops, student projects, community learning setting (the inquiries).

‘Demonstrator’ projects of what AI might do in education need to be accompanied by some kind of inquiry or evaluation, even if small-scale, involving learners in authentic learning settings. Participants are therefore advised to consider what learning outcomes their innovations are designed to support, and how they will evidence these. Outcomes do not need to be limited to formal examination results: evidence of improved student engagement, motivation, or achievement of skills or competencies are all in scope.

The competition does not require a specific research methodology to be used. A wide variety of approaches are welcome, including but not limited to action research, design-based research, pre-test/post-test models, case studies, learning surveys, attitude surveys, and secondary data analysis. The emphasis is on the quality, rigour, and relevance of the research rather than adherence to any particular methodological tradition. Participants are encouraged to select methods that best suit their research questions and learning contexts, ensuring that their chosen approach allows them to generate meaningful insights into teaching and learning. 

Robust small scale studies are perfectly acceptable, as are mixed-methods studies which (for example) combine learning analytics and class-level examination results with data from interviews and focus groups with students, classroom observations, or analysis of student work.

There is some flexibility in submission format. Participants may prefer to submit a conventional research report of up to 5000 words, or may prefer to present a substantive ‘artefact’ such as a learning object, web resource, or software tool, which is then accompanied by a shorter commentary.

Format of Submissions

Participants are required to submit:

• Biographies of the team leader (<100 words) and all team members (<50 words)
• A structured abstract in English of no more than 350 words setting out:
  • The context in which the innovation and inquiry took place
  • The problem, challenge or opportunity that the innovation addresses
  • The methods used to develop and evaluate the innovation
  • The main findings and outcomes of the inquiry into the innovation
  • The implications for teacher practice of the innovation
• A project report of 2000-5000 words in any language that includes:
  • A clear and informative title
  • The structured abstract (as above) in the report language and in English.
  • A list of 5-8 keywords that capture the context, content and key technologies used
  • A description of the context (organisational, disciplinary, pedagogical) in which the innovation and inquiry took place
  • The problem, challenge or opportunity that the innovation addresses
  • The methods and approaches used to design and develop the innovation
  • A description of the educational setting into which the innovation was introduced and what was done
  • A description of the ethical framework that governed the development and implementation of the innovation, including how informed consent was obtained from participants
  • The main findings and outcomes of the inquiry into the innovation
  • The implications for teacher practice of the innovation
  • A reflective evaluation including next steps and future directions
  • Key references and sources of information, including any existing platforms, software resources, language models or algorithms used
• [optional] Supporting materials such as new curricula, learning materials, activities, new data sets, links to web applications
• [optional] A technical appendix of no more than 2000 words describing the key technologies used in the innovation and identifiers such as URLs, DOIs or repository identifiers.
• [optional but recommended] a video in MP4 or MOV format presenting the report findings concisely for an audience of teachers (not technology specialists).

Competition Schedule 

(1) Registration

Registration Start: April 20, 2025

Registration End: May 31, 2025

(2) Preliminary Round

Submission Start: April 20, 2025

Submission End: September 12, 2025

(3) Final Round

Final Round Date: End of September, specific date to be announced later

Final Results Announcement: Mid-October

(4) Award Ceremony

The award ceremony will be held in early November 2025 in Beijing, China. 

The specific time and format will be notified separately.

All the times mentioned in the schedule are in Beijing time. 

The organizing committee of the competition reserves the right to update the competition format and schedule as necessary.

Awards

There is no cash prize, and awards are set as follows:

1 Gold Award

1-3 Silver Awards

3-5 Bronze Awards

6-10 Excellence Awards

We cordially invite the winning representatives to attend the awards ceremony in Beijing, with travel and accommodation expenses reimbursed by the organizing committee.

Publication

Entries which fulfil quality criteria can be published in the DI-IDEA Hub, part of the digital library of Camtree: The Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange. Camtree is a global platform for close-to-practice research in education based at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. Once peer-reviewed, the outcomes of these inquiries will be assigned DOI numbers and published within the DI-IDEA Hub under an open-access Creative Commons Licence (CC-BY 4.0). 

Intellectual Property Rights

The report, materials and any algorithms, datasets, workflows remain the intellectual property of the participants. 

Software submitted as part of entries, and subsequently accompanying publications in Camtree should be made publicly accessible under an appropriate licence.

Submission to the competition or to the Camtree does not imply transfer of copyright.