The Competition

Ages 12–15. Middle school students. Projects are judged against age-appropriate expectations; we look for original thinking and clear reasoning, not university-level execution.

Ages 16–18. High school and equivalent. Projects are expected to engage seriously with prior work in the field and to articulate what the student is contributing.

Enter alone or in teams of up to four. Teams may be cross-school. Mixed-age teams are placed in the division of the oldest member.

Investigations in physics, chemistry, biology, or earth sciences. We expect a stated hypothesis, a method that can be reproduced, and an honest discussion of error and limitations. Negative results are welcome.

Hardware projects, mechanical and electrical systems, embedded software, and physical robots. Submissions must include a working prototype, a bill of materials, and a clear problem statement.

Algorithms, applications, machine learning, and computational research. Source code must be public under an OSI-approved licence; AI projects must disclose datasets, model choices, and evaluation methodology.

Energy, water, materials, biodiversity, and climate adaptation. Projects must quantify the change they propose and be candid about scale: a working intervention in one classroom is more valuable than a hypothetical global plan.

Public health, accessibility, education, civic technology, and community design. Entries must show the project was tested with real users — not just surveyed about hypothetically.

For work that doesn't fit a box: art–science crossovers, new instruments, speculative design, philosophical investigations grounded in evidence. Rigor and originality are the standards.

Students register on the LBX portal, choose a regional hub, and complete an orientation module on research ethics, attribution, and how the judging works. Mentors are matched within two weeks.

A two-page proposal is submitted in the first month: the question, why it matters, prior work, the plan, and the artefact you intend to build. Mentors give written feedback; weak proposals are revised, not rejected.

Mid-season, students submit a working draft of the artefact and a short video walking through what they have so far. This is the point where most projects change direction; that is expected.

Students present in person at their regional hub — Singapore, Hong Kong, London, or New York. Each finalist gets a fifteen-minute slot: a short presentation, a demonstration, and live questions from the judging panel.

The top entries from each region are invited to the Global Final, held in a rotating host city. Travel grants are available for finalists who need them; no student should miss the final for cost reasons.

Is the problem worth working on? Has the student framed it themselves, or inherited it? We weight this heavily.

Does the artefact work? Is the method sound? Can someone else reproduce what was done from the documentation provided?

How honestly does the student discuss what didn't work, what they learned, and what they would do next? Polished but shallow loses to rough but searching.

Can the student explain the work to someone outside their field, and answer a hard question without retreating into jargon?

Each regional showcase names a Track Winner and two Highly Commended entries per track, per division. All regional finalists receive a published showcase page.

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 spirit of the X, regardless of category.

Standout projects are introduced to partner universities, research labs, and programmes that may want to support continued work. The strongest outcome of LBX is rarely the award; it is the next door it opens.