Turn Ideas Into AI-Powered Apps

Students identify a real problem and build a working solution: an AI-powered mobile app, website, or video game. Every project is developed to launch, with support through App Store submission, patent-pending filing, and competition preparation.

Eligibility: Grades 9 through 12
Duration: 1 to 2 months (accelerated) or 2 to 4 months (standard)
Time commitment: 4 - 8 hours per week
Deliverable: Launched app with optional patent-pending filing competition entry

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Download Program Guide

Open to middle and high school students worldwide.

Program Overview

What Can You Build?

No technical background is required. Instructors support you in bringing your vision to life. What you need is the drive to solve a problem. Students have built AI-powered products addressing challenges across health, education, financial access, law sustainability, and more. A few examples:

Social good: A financial literacy app helping women experiencing homelessness build economic stability before a crisis hits
Healthcare: An early screening tool that helps teenagers identify signs of anxiety and connect with school-based mental health resources
Law: A voter registration assistant that guides first-time voters through eligibility requirements, deadlines, and polling logistics in plain language
Sustainability: A household carbon tracking app that translates everyday purchasing decisions into measurable environmental impact

Have a strong technical background?

The program meets you where you are. Students with computer science experience have used it to go further. They train and fine-tune their own models and work on problems that require genuine technical depth. Your mentor will work at the level your project demands.

A music generation model fine-tuned on a specific genre or artist style, with a web interface for users to generate original tracks.
A sentiment analysis tool that tracks public opinion shifts around a specific policy issue using Twitter or Reddit data
An image classification model trained to identify plant diseases from photos, using openly available agricultural datasets.

Choose Your Track

Choosing your track in the Nova Scholar program is a pivotal step in shaping your entrepreneurial journey.

Standard

10 Sessions (20 Hours)

Ten 2-hour sessions over 2.5 months during the school year, or 5 weeks in the summer. You will leave with a working AI-powered product you built and launched to the App Store.

Choose Standard if you want to build:

Are new to product development and want a structured introduction to the process

Want to design and build a working AI-powered app, website, or video game

Have a fuller schedule or more limited availability

Get Started

Premium

10 Sessions (20 Hours) + 10 Hours of 1:1 Mentorship

Ten 2-hour sessions plus 10 dedicated 1:1 hours over 15 weeks during the school year, or 2 months in the summer. The 1:1 time is focused on deeper development, patent writing, and competition preparation.

Choose Premium if you want to build:

Want to file for patent-pending status on your product

Plan to enter a technology or entrepreneurship competition

Want your project to serve as a signature component of your college application

Want more time to build, refine, and take your idea further

Get Started

App Store submission is included in both tracks. Patent-pending filing and competition preparation are Premium only and are not available as standalone add-ons.

Your Journey to Launch (How it Works)

Nova mentors are from top 25 universities

You deserve world-class support to reach your full potential. That’s why every Nova mentor is a graduate candidate, professor, or alumnus of a top 25 university, including Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. We want middle and high school students to create meaningful work that showcases their best selves.

Why Nova Research Is Different

Download Program Guide

The Nova AI Product Launch Guarantee

Every student leaves with something real: an AI-powered mobile app, web app, video game, or other AI product to proudly showcase. Mobile apps are guaranteed publication in the app store, and web apps are guaranteed to go live online.

Each invention includes built-in legal support and filing so that students’ inventions receive “patent-pending” status.

Learn more here ↗

Student Projects Showcase

See More Student Projects

AI Speech Coach for Public Speaking

An AI-powered speech training app that helps users practice and improve public speaking with real-time feedback and personalized coaching. Using speech recognition and natural language processing, it analyzes pacing, tone, clarity, and filler words—then delivers instant tips for improvement. Features include practice modes for presentations and impromptu speaking, plus an interactive progress dashboard to track growth over time.Users can access speaking drills, review feedback, and build confidence as more effective communicators.

Personalized AI Tutor for Underserved Students

An AI-driven tutoring app that provides personalized learning support for students, especially in underserved communities. It uses NLP to break down complex subjects, offer step-by-step explanations, and create customized study plans based on student performance. The app includes speech-to-text and text-to-speech features for accessibility and a progress dashboard to track learning milestones. Students can also connect with volunteer mentors and peers for collaborative learning.

AI Environmental Impact Analyzer

Encourages users to make eco-friendly choices by scanning product barcodes to analyze carbon footprint, recyclability, and ethical sourcing. Using AI and machine learning, it suggests sustainable product alternatives, tracks carbon emissions, and provides real-time sustainability tips. Users can scan receipts and bills to monitor consumption patterns. The app promotes environmental awareness through personalized challenges to reduce waste and emissions.

Women’s AI Health
Companion

An AI-powered women’s health app that combines menstrual and mental health tracking with personalized care recommendations. It uses a generative AI assistant to provide cycle- and mood-based tips, and a smart provider match engine to connect users with nearby healthcare services based on symptoms, insurance, and availability. The app includes an integrated calendar that syncs cycle data, check-ins, and appointments into one visual timeline, helping women manage both physical and emotional health in a single hub.

Cultural Bias in Deep-Learning Models

Won: Washington State Science & Engineering Fair

This project investigated cultural bias in AI emotion recognition by training two ResNet-18 models, one on South Asian faces and the other on Caucasian faces. Each model misclassified emotions from the other group, but introducing a small proportion of cross-cultural images improved accuracy across demographics without reducing within-group performance, showing that modest data diversification can reduce bias in sensitive applications like healthcare, law enforcement, and education.

Download report here ↗

The Ethics of Genetic Selection

Published in: Curieux Academic Journal

Emerging tools for genetic selection raise difficult ethical and social questions. Advocates see opportunities to lessen human suffering by reducing inherited conditions, while critics warn about reinforcing inequality and creating narrow definitions of genetic “normalcy.” Lessons from the history of eugenics illustrate the risks of exclusion and discrimination, and debates about disability highlight that quality of life is not easily defined. Access to genetic technologies is also shaped by socioeconomic inequality, adding another layer of concern. Responsible progress in this field depends on strong safeguards, inclusive decision-making, and a commitment to respecting human diversity.

Download report here ↗

What will your Nova Patent experience look like?

Nova Patent Program:

Results in a novel innovation (a mobile application or physical product) that makes a positive impact on the world and achieves "patent pending" status.

Build a mobile application or other software product with your team in an area you're passionate about

Achieves "patent pending" status

Select from a curated list of patentable projects

14 small 2-hour group classes

Maximum of 5 students to 1 mentor

3 sessions with a patent writing expert to support application writing and submission

2 - 4 months long depending on cohort

Nova Scholar Patent Pathway

The AI Product Launch program includes Patent Pathway, a selective track that pairs students with intellectual property specialists to explore patent protection.

What’s Included:

Expert Guidance → Up to 3 sessions with patent professionals experienced in youth innovation and early-stage IP.
Hands-On Support → Step-by-step help drafting and preparing provisional or design patent applications.
Prestige Credential → Guaranteed “Patent Pending” status, a unique distinction that strengthens college applications, competitions, and portfolios.

Hear From Our Students

"I volunteer with women who have experienced homelessness. A population that is disproportionately made up of former foster children. I wanted to build something that could help prepare them financially before a crisis hits, but I had no coding experience. By the end of the program I had a working app. I genuinely like this class also, as I also started doing individual projects on my own because I was inspired by this program. I really like how much the sessions were shaped around each student's specific project. Our mentor brought her own background into the feedback and the sessions were well run and genuinely interactive, with the input from other students in the group pushed my idea in directions I would not have reached by myself"

Kathy [Last Name], [High School Name], Class of [Year]

Read Kathy’s case study

"My instructor has been deeply involved in every part of the process: product design, utility, and the patent filing itself. Learning what qualifies as novel and understanding intellectual property law was not something I expected to get out of this. I now have a patent pending on my vaping detection device."

Soohan [Last Name], [High School Name], Class of [Year]

Read Soohan's case study

Ready to get started?

Cohorts share a start date, but individual session times are scheduled around your availability. If a conflict arises (e.g., AP exams, finals, competitions) sessions can be rescheduled with 48 hours notice. Applications received after the regular deadline are processed as late enrollment. Late applicants are matched within one to three weeks. Late pricing applies regardless of when enrollment occurs within the cycle.

Upcoming

Summer I 2026

Application deadline: May 24, 2026.

Sessions meet: Mondays and Thursdays, 5:30 to 7:30 PM PT

Duration:

Standard: June 8 - July 9.

Premium: June 8 - July 30.

Upcoming

Summer I 2026

Application deadline: May 24, 2026.

Sessions meet: Mondays and Thursdays, 5:30 to 7:30 PM PT

Duration: