In an effort to judge school students on their knowledge of Information Technology (IT), the regional round of ‘TCS IT Wiz’ was held at Chowdaiah Memorial Hall.
The quiz contest was conducted to choose the ‘Smart Tech Wizard 2013’.
The contest started with the written preliminaries so as to choose the six teams that would go on stage.
While the five different rounds were ‘Data Clouds’, ‘Big Data Visualization’, ‘IOT- Internet of Things’, ‘Pin Trust!’ and ‘@TCS’, the quiz focussed on applications of IT across various sectors such as the internet and unique websites, IT buzzwords and acronyms, history of IT as well as the humorous side of IT.
As quizmaster Giri points out, “This quiz is to break the common misconception that IT is computer science as taught in the schools. IT is a broader term. In this City, where students hear about IT from a young age, one needs to know that it involves a lot more.”
Giri also adds that since people here are more aware of information technology, the teams are often very competitive and quizzing is always an interesting experience.
Balaji MT from Sree Kumaran Children’s Home, a member of the team which became the runner-up, talks about the team’s preparations.
“We’ve been reading and working hard, sharing information and sitting together to prepare for the quiz for the last three months. We referred to many blogs and material online, which helped us prepare a lot,” he says.
For Udit Jain and Antony Paul from NPS Indiranagar, it was a fulfilling experience to be on the stage.
“Every bit of information we had, we shared it instead of dividing the portions to cover. That itself was a great learning experience. We would meet up for lunch and strategically prepare for the quiz to make sure that we left out on nothing,” shares Udit. Antony says that the school’s library teacher helped them a great deal in preparing for the same.
“Most importantly, our parents always reminded us that 'winning wasn't everything' and that helped a lot,” he adds. The winning team of Harikiran and Siddarth from St Paul’s English School were seen celebrating the school’s hat-trick win. “We were desperate to win and did everything possible to reach that goal. We even prepared during the summer holidays and our teachers and seniors helped us out with the same.”
So which round did the team find challenging? The duo says that they found most of the rounds very easy. “The ‘Big Data Visualization’ was a challenging round, but we are so glad that we made it,” they say.