Battling with the best

Competitive

The quiz was conducted in three phases. A pre-selection round was held at the college level where ten teams were selected from each institution. These teams moved onto the regional finals held at Gulbarga, Dharwad, Tumkur, Mysore, Bangalore and Mangalore.

Organised by the Tata Consultancy Services in collaboration with The Board of IT Education Standards (BITES), Tech Bytes had more than 150 engineering colleges participate with full enthusiasm.

Interestingly, the cricket fever had caught on with the organisers as well for the quiz was designed in such a way that the students would score runs for every right answer instead of marks.

The quiz began with the ‘TCS Tech Bytes’ where the teams had to choose a letter from the title of the quiz show. An additional hint was that the answer would begin from the chosen letter. This was followed by ‘Speed Gun’,  a rapid fire round with a buzzer. In ‘Third Umpire’, teams were required to have a perspective beyond what is seen, more like the role of the third umpire in a cricket match. The final round titled ‘Duck and Lewis’ had a set of four questions and a formula. The teams had to apply the formula to arrive at the final answer. Quiz master Giri Balasubramanium did well to pep up the teams and keep the audience entertained.

The final round of the quiz had the two top teams of the event — BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore (BMSCE) and Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering from Mysore — battling it out for the top slot. However, the BMS College of Engineering was declared the winner. 

Speaking after winning, Himadri Banerjee and Akshath A, both second year engineering students from BMSCE said, “We never expected to win, even in the regional rounds, we thought we were going to lose, but it was an unexpected victory. We are thrilled that we won the state finals. It was an educational experience that we will cherish it for a long time to come.”  The winners were given an educational scholarship worth Rs 60,000. Nagaraj Ijari, vice president and Head TCS Operations, Bangalore gave away the prizes.