As soon as the buzzer lights went on, the entire audience held their breath and waited to see who would get the answer right. As it turned out, the top two teams had to go into a tie-breaker to determine the winner of the TCS IT Wiz 2012 quiz. After a nerve wracking question about cloud computing, Prempal Singh and Arnav Sharma, class 12 boys from Delhi’s New Era Public School walked away with an Xbox, an iPod touch and an iPod docking station each, along with the satisfaction of being the best minds in the science arena in the entire country.
More than 3,500 schools from 14 cities across the country participated in the TCS IT quiz, which had its national finals here on Saturday.
Jamshedpur boys Aviral Dasgupta and Shubham Agarwal from Loyola School representing Kolkata, won the second place. The third place went to Sahid Murtuza and Aneesh Kallarpur from the Sri Chaitanya Junior College, Hyderabad.
The short 90-minute quiz saw five intense rounds, some of them creatively named ‘Angry Nerds’, ‘Grand Theft Answers’ and ‘Max Pain’. As the number of questions dwindled and the buzzer lights lit up more frequently, the quiz saw some of the brightest young minds in the country battling it out for the top spot.
The Chennai team thought they had bulldozed their way into the finals, but lost the plot midway. Other brilliant teams such as Kochi, Nagpur and Lucknow failed to enter the finals.
The quizmaster, Giri Pickbrain, said that many teams that won regularly failed to win this time due to lack of experience.