CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGES AI SUMMER CAMP 2026

CALL FOR CHALLENGES

The California Community Colleges Summer AI Camp is seeking impactful challenge submissions from campus leadership, staff, and administrators across the California Community Colleges system.

July 19 – 24, 2026 | Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

Selected challenges will be tackled by mentored student teams during the camp.

ABOUT THE CAMP

The camp is structured as a five-day, Learn by Doing hackathon, where 100 students from throughout the California Community College system will receive a no-cost immersive experience learning and applying AI technical basics to real world challenges. The camp will end with team pitches of the solutions they have developed against the challenges selected. The demonstrated solutions each team develops will help pave the way for potential implementation across California Community Colleges campuses.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Challenges that address real problems or opportunities on your campus. Your submission should include:

  • Problem or opportunity — What needs to be addressed? (150 words or less)

  • Customers and stakeholders — Who are the intermediary users (e.g., faculty) and end users (e.g., students)?

  • Data availability — Is sample or synthetic data available? Data can mean anything from website content to PDFs to spreadsheets to databases.

Optional additional details are welcome but not required: desired outcomes, success metrics, current software or services in use, and available implementation resources.

For questions and assistance developing your challenge statement, please contact akhanna@cccdigitalcenter.org.

HOW IT WORKS

  • Submit your challenge — This form takes about 5 minutes. You are welcome to provide additional details, but your idea will receive full consideration either way.

  • Review by DxHub and AWS — Your proposal will be reviewed by DxHub staff from Cal Poly and AWS. If not selected for summer camp, we will still follow up on ways to move your proposal forward.

  • Student teams build solutions — Selected challenges are assigned to mentored student teams who build and pitch working prototypes during camp week.

  • Ongoing collaboration — Colleges whose challenges are qualified and selected will have the opportunity to engage with the Dx Hub team to further develop their solution and participate in ongoing collaboration and support to advance the work.

  • Open-sourced results — Together, with customers’ approval, the DxHub posts short case studies with open-sourced solutions for all challenges.

CHALLENGE EXAMPLES

💬 Build a Chatbot Grounded in Your Data
Your advising office fields the same questions hundreds of times a semester. A chatbot that answers students using your actual catalog, degree requirements, and financial aid policies — with citations staff can verify.

📄 Parse and Structure Unstructured Data
Admissions staff manually pull key details from uploaded transcripts, recommendation letters, or AP invoices. AI that reads those documents, extracts the relevant fields, and stages them in a structured format for staff to review.

⚖️ Apply Decision-Making Frameworks at Scale
Your advising office fields the same questions hundreds of times a semester. A chatbot that answers students using your actual catalog, degree requirements, and financial aid policies — with citations staff can verify.

🔄 Automate a Multi-Step Workflow
Transfer credit evaluation requires pulling transcripts, checking course equivalencies across catalogs, and drafting evaluations. An AI agent that handles the legwork and drafts evaluations for an advisor to review and approve.

🎧 Real-Time Interactive AI Assistance
Your campus help desk handles calls about registration, parking, IT issues, and more. A voice or chat system where callers describe their issue and get real-time answers drawn from your campus data or get routed to the right person.

WHO SHOULD SUBMIT

  • Campus / College leadership and administrators
  • CCC system partners
  • Staff across the California Community Colleges system
  • Anyone with a real campus problem that could benefit from an AI-powered solution

KEY DATES

Challenge Submission Deadline June 1 2026 @ 5 p.m. PST
Selection Notification June 15, 2026
Camp Week July 19 – 24, 2026
Submit a Challenge
Use the Challenge Chatbot

Prefer an AI-powered submission experience? Use the challenge chatbot instead.