Oak Harbor student advances in Bill Nye science contest, builds AI tools

At 10, Jet Lai was already spending his time on two very different tracks: food and YouTube on one side, college-level coursework and AI tools on the other. The Oak Harbor Elementary School student was also leading his group in America’s Favorite Student, the national contest presented by Bill Nye.

If Jet won, the grand prize would bring $20,000, a feature in Reader’s Digest and a tour of The Planetary Society with Nye. The competition is tied to inspiring curiosity and supporting space exploration, which fits a student who says he wants to use coding and artificial intelligence to help people and, someday, solve problems in space exploration.

Jet has not treated the subject like a hobby. He was working through Google’s AI Skills curriculum, building his own AI tools from home and had designed two AI agents on his desktop. He was also experimenting with a project he called Jet Car AI for a realistic driving game. Jet said he learned coding with help from Copilot, and he was sharing some of that learning on a YouTube channel called @Jetsfoodadventures.

His father, Andrew Lai, called him a genius, but the boy’s interests still sounded very much like those of a child who liked to explore rather than recite. He was drawn to food, video, and discovering how things worked, then turning around and trying to build something new from what he learned.

The story also pointed to a larger question for Island County families: what happens when a student’s curiosity runs ahead of the system around him. Oak Harbor Public Schools says it serves more than 5,400 students on Whidbey Island, and Oak Harbor Elementary School sits at 151 SE Midway Boulevard in Oak Harbor. The district said 83 percent of students surveyed in 2024-25 reported supportive relationships with adults at school, and its strategic goal is to raise that to 95 percent by June 2027.

For Jet, those numbers matter because advanced students often need more than encouragement. They need adults who notice early talent, flexible programs that do not flatten curiosity and space to keep building. That tension sits behind his rise, along with the larger profile of Bill Nye himself, who stepped down as chief executive officer of The Planetary Society in January and became chief ambassador as Jennifer Vaughn took over as CEO on February 17. The Planetary Society said Nye was still headed to Washington, D.C., for its Day of Action in April as advocates pressed against proposed NASA budget cuts.