In the end, it came down to 213 thousandths of a second! That was the difference between the two best times in the finale of the first AWS AWS DeepRacer Student Wildcard event hosted in Ottawa, Canada this May. I watched in awe as 13 students competed in a live wildcard race for the AWS DeepRacer Student League, the first global autonomous racing league for students offering educational material and resources to get hands on and start with machine learning (ML). Students hit the starting line to put their ML skills to the test in Canada's capital where members of parliament cheered them on, including Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Andy Fillmore. Daphne Hong, a fourth-year engineering student at the University of Calgary, won the race with a lap time of 11:167 seconds.

Q: When does the AWS DeepRacer Student League begin? December 1, 2021 begins a three-month AWS DeepRacer Student League pre-season. During the pre-season, students get early access to over 20 hours of free artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) foundational education content, and access to AWS DeepRacer Student. Students learn how to teach their car to drive around the track in preparation for the official AWS DeepRacer Student League season, kicking off on March 1, 2022. Competitions run monthly within AWS DeepRacer Student until September 30, 2022.