The Competition

LBX is a season, not a single day. Students register, choose a track, work with a mentor, and submit two checkpoints before presenting at a regional showcase in Singapore, Hong Kong, London or New York. The strongest entries from each hub are invited to the Global Final.

Apply for the 2026 Season → How to build a project

Eligibility and team size

  • Junior Division

    Ages 12–15 on 1 September 2026. Middle-school and equivalent. We look for original thinking and clear reasoning, not university-level execution.

  • Senior Division

    Ages 16–18 on 1 September 2026. High school and equivalent. Projects should engage prior work in the field and say what the student is adding.

  • Solo or team of four

    Enter alone or in a team of two, three or four. Teams may be cross-school and cross-city. Mixed-age teams sit in the division of the oldest member. A team has one track, one hub and one submission.

Six tracks

  • Applied Sciences

    Investigations in physics, chemistry, biology or earth sciences. State a hypothesis, a method someone else could run, and an honest discussion of error. Negative results are welcome.

  • Engineering & Robotics

    Hardware, mechanical and electrical systems, embedded software, physical robots. Include a working prototype, a bill of materials and a defined problem.

  • Computer Science & AI

    Algorithms, applications, machine learning and computational research. Source must be public under an OSI-approved licence. Disclose datasets, model choices and evaluation.

  • Sustainability & Climate

    Energy, water, materials, biodiversity or climate adaptation. Quantify the change you propose. A working intervention in one classroom beats a hypothetical global plan.

  • Social Innovation

    Public health, accessibility, education, civic technology and community design. Show the project was tested with real users, not only surveyed hypothetically.

  • Open Exploration

    Art–science crossovers, new instruments, speculative design, evidence-grounded philosophical work. Rigor and originality are the standards.

Track checklists

Applied Sciences: a hypothesis you could falsify; raw data or a lab notebook excerpt; error discussed in numbers, not adjectives; a methods section that names instruments and concentrations. Engineering and Robotics: a prototype that moves or measures in the room; a bill of materials with sources; a photograph of the bench; a log of the failure that changed the design. Computer Science and AI: a public repository, an OSI-approved licence, a README that installs, a note on train/test splits, and a sentence on what the model is not allowed to claim. Sustainability and Climate: a measured change, a boundary (one roof, one pond, one classroom), and a refusal to scale the claim past the evidence. Social Innovation: named users, dates of tests, what they did with the thing, and what they refused. Open Exploration: a standard of rigor you declare at the proposal so judges are not guessing which field’s rules you think you are in.

These checklists are not extra criteria. They are the Build column of the rubric, spelled out so that a team does not arrive in May with only slides. If your artefact cannot travel, record it before you travel and bring a section of it. Judges have seen enough rendered machines.

After a complaint

Anyone can write to the academic committee about a submission they believe is not the students’ work. The committee reads the trail — proposal, progress, final, contribution statement — and may ask for a conversation. Mentors are witnesses, not defendants, unless the complaint is about the mentor. Outcomes are written to the student and, where an award is affected, to the registry. We do not publish the names of students under review.

Team disputes (who did the work) are handled through the contribution statement first. A member who cannot answer a method question on showcase day has already told the panel something the statement may have hidden. That is a communication and a Lead problem, not only a social one.

How a judging conversation actually goes

Two judges sit down. They have read the report. They will still ask you to start with the question in one sentence, then to show the artefact. They will pick a number in the table and ask where it came from. They will pick a joint on the chassis and ask who soldered it. They will ask what you would delete if you had to ship tomorrow. They are not trying to catch you out; they are trying to see whether the trail is real. A student who says “I don’t know, we copied that graph” has just told the truth and can still score on exploration if the rest of the work is theirs. A student who defends a graph they have never opened will not.

Scores are written independently, then discussed. Ties are allowed. Empty tracks are allowed. The Exploration Prize can go to a project that did not win its track. That is not a slight; it is the X. After the public day, judges file the short citation that will appear on a certificate if an award is given. That citation is specific. “For a well-presented project” is not a citation we use.

You may not record the closed session. You may take a photograph of your own poster on the public day if your consent box allows photographs of you. You may not photograph another team’s bench without asking. Those rules exist because minors are in the room, not because we are precious about ideas.

Rules that apply to every track

Work submitted to LBX must be the students’ own. Mentors, teachers and parents may ask questions, lend tools and point to papers; they may not design the method, write the report or build the artefact. AI assistants are allowed with disclosure — see FAQ. Human-subjects work, animal work and environmental sampling need a brief ethics note at the proposal checkpoint; the academic committee can require a revision before the project continues. Hazardous materials, weapons and surveillance of unconsenting people are out of bounds.

A project may be based on work started before the season, provided the substantial new work happens during the season and the report draws a clear line between “already done” and “done in LBX”. The same project may not be submitted to two LBX tracks in the same year. Students may enter other competitions with the same idea; LBX is not exclusive and is not an ISEF affiliate.

What to submit

Three packages, not one. Missing a checkpoint does not automatically disqualify a team, but it leaves the mentor and judges without a trail, which hurts the exploration score.

Proposal checkpoint — two pages

The question; why it matters; a short map of prior work; the plan; the artefact you intend to build; risks and ethics. Weak proposals are revised, not rejected.

Progress checkpoint — artefact draft plus video

A working draft of the artefact, a video of no more than four minutes walking through what exists, and a note on what changed since the proposal. This is where most projects change direction. That is expected.

Final package — due 30 April 2027

  • Project report (Junior: 8–12 pages; Senior: 12–20 pages) including methods, evidence, limitations and next questions.
  • The artefact (repository, dataset, hardware log, study protocol — whatever the track requires).
  • A poster in A1 portrait or a digital equivalent at 2480 × 3508 px.
  • A presentation video of no more than six minutes.
  • A one-page contribution statement for teams, signed by every member.
  • AI-and-assistance disclosure: tools used, and what they did not do.

On showcase day you also bring the physical prototype if you have one, or a laptop that can run the software offline. Judges will ask you to demonstrate, not only to narrate.

Judging rubric

Each criterion is scored 1–5 by at least two judges. Regional awards are comparative within a track and division; a track may have no winner if the bar is not met. The same rubric is used at the Global Final.

CriterionWeightWhat a 5 looks like
Originality of the question (Lead)25%The student framed a problem that is theirs, not inherited from a kit or a mentor’s grant, and can say why it is worth the months.
Quality of the build (Build)30%The artefact works under demonstration; the method is sound; a stranger could reproduce the core claim from the documentation.
Depth of exploration (eXplore)25%Dead ends are reported; limitations are specific; the next experiment is obvious from the evidence, not from a wish.
Communication20%The student can explain the work to someone outside the field and answer a hard question without retreating into jargon.

Junior and Senior use the same four criteria. Junior scores are interpreted against age-appropriate expectation: a twelve-year-old who designed their own method outranks a fourteen-year-old who executed a parent’s protocol perfectly.

Awards

Each regional showcase names a Track Winner and up to two Highly Commended entries per track, per division. All regional presenters receive a published showcase page if they opt in. The Global Final names a Grand Prize per division, six Track Champions, and the LBX Exploration Prize — given to the project that most embodies the X, regardless of category. Certificates are recorded in the public registry and can be checked at verify.