It was literally the battle of brains at the Hyderabad edition of Tata Consultancy Services' IT Wiz 2010 held at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan on Thursday.
Six teams, comprising two contestants each, were selected from over 1,000 students in a preliminary round to compete in the Hyderabad finals. The teams were quizzed on autonomic computing, which deals with the changes in IT industry, cloud computing, ‘@TCS', parallel computing, grid computing and general knowledge pertaining to the IT industry.
Interestingly, in the first round, the contestants were asked a question by N. Chandrasekaran, CEO and MD of TCS, on a video link. Every time a question was asked by quiz master Giri ‘Pickbrain' Balasubramaniam, children in the audience would break into discussions of their own and applause their respective team when they got the right answer. Ratna Prabha, Principal Secretary, IT and C Department, and V. Rajanna, vice-president and Regional Head of TCS, were also present at the event.
Two tie-breakers
Right from audio-visual questions to clues and a specific quiz on TCS, queries were shot at students related to IT buzzwords, personalities, companies, software products and brands. The cut throat competition was such that the last round had two tie breakers.
The first question in the tie-breaker was ‘Who invented hotmail along with Sabeer Bhatia?' within no time, the students of FIIT JEE and Little Flower High School, Abids, answered, ‘Jack Smith'.
With two teams tied again in first place, another question was shot at them. “What is a ghost profile in a social networking site?” To this, the students of FIIT JEE, Krishna Akhil and Rohan Naidu answered, “Profile of a person who has died,” hence breaking the tie and bagged the first place.
The second prize was given to Syed Murtuza Hashmi and B. Asher from Little Flower High School, Abids, and the third place was tied between Aditya Gupta and Anurag Veturi from Chirec Public School, K.V.S. Lokesh and G. Sai Teja from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Jubilee Hills and P.Kaushik and Shubam Vyas from Sri Chaitanya Junior College.
The regional winners will participate in the national finals in December.
