This spring AV Data Science hosted their first data science competition, inviting teams from high schools all over the bay. The competition was held in two rounds, the first taking place online over the course of two weeks and the second a live round where the teams, family, and friends were invited to watch. The finals for the event was held at Santa Clara University, where the top seven groups got to present their projects in front of a panel of judges.
Planning
The club first got the idea to create a competition as a way to increase interest in their club within Amador but also to encourage students to use data science to solve local problems.
“We were inspired by the hackathons of Kaggle to create this competition. We saw that coding competitions were popular for CS high school students everywhere, yet we realised there weren’t many competitions focused specifically on data analytics.” said club president Rutvi Mudalgi (‘27).
To begin setting up the event, they reached out through email to data science clubs from local schools. The competition ended up including multiple teams from Dougherty Valley, and Irvington High School.
“A big part of the planning was outreach. We connected with many schools across the Bay Area and emphasized that the competition was open to all skill levels, and that it was not just about technical work.” said AV Data Science Vice President Vidushee Bala (‘27).
Initial Stages
The initial stages of the competition had teams working on projects that fit the theme of Sustainable Solutions. They could choose any topic under this umbrella and incorporate data analysis to find a solution to whatever problem they chose to tackle.
“We also conducted three workshops during the two week time frame of the first round for students to attend if they wanted to learn about data cleaning and analysis techniques they could potentially use,” said Mudalgi.
Finals
Once the initial round of projects were submitted, the AV Data Science club officers went through each of the projects and handpicked the top seven teams to move on to the final presentations. These finalists would present their projects to a panel made up of a professor at Santa Clara University and two industry experts.
“After each finalist presented there was a short Q&A and we had many thoughtful questions from both the judges and audience members…students had to defend their choices and think on their feet, which made it much closer to a professional setting.” said Bala.
The judges were able to pick three teams to be honored at the awards ceremony that concluded the event. The winners were Team 0110 0111: Julian Juan, Andrew Qian, and Naitik Gupta from Los Gatos High School.
Impact
“I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that data science is just about coding or building models. In reality, it’s about asking the right questions and using data to support decisions. Especially in the age of AI, much of the technical work can be automated. It’s about bringing a human perspective to the numbers and using them to create something tangible and meaningful. So, through this competition, we wanted to push students to turn the data into a sustainable solution.” said Bala.
Overall the competition was a huge success for the Data Science Club and they are determined to keep it going as an annual event. They hope that it will help show people that data science is about more than just the numbers, it’s the interpretation and solutions that evolve from it that count.
