The DARPA Grand Challenge was a landmark series of competitions in the mid‑2000s organized by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to accelerate research in autonomous ground vehicles. Teams from universities, industry, and independent groups built self-driving vehicles that had to navigate long, off-road desert courses without human intervention. The 2004 and 2005 "Grand Challenge" events, followed by the 2007 Urban Challenge, significantly advanced the field of robotics and laid groundwork for modern self-driving car technology. These competitions are now concluded and **no longer run as an active contest**, so high school students cannot currently enter a DARPA Grand Challenge in the original sense. However, the Grand Challenge series remains an important case study and inspiration for robotics and AI projects. High school students interested in similar experiences can look into contemporary robotics competitions (e.g., FIRST Robotics, RoboCup, or autonomous vehicle contests) and can study DARPA Grand Challenge archives, technical reports, and videos to learn about systems engineering, perception, planning, and real-world testing at scale.