NIE (Newspaper in Education, a subsidiary of The Times of India) hosted a competition, Think 'n Learn challenge a few weeks ago. They sent question sheets to 125 schools in my city and we had the 1st round in our school itself. It was just a simple test which had puzzles that required logical and analytical reasoning. No one really took it seriously until one of us read the rules and saw "Winner at the school level will receive a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3".

That being said, everyone started writing the test sincerely. It was just a multiple-choice test and we were done with it in an hour. For the next three weeks, we had all forgotten about it.

But then, last week, the results were declared. From our school, out of around 200 participants, 53 had received 90+ percentile and had qualified for the next round, city level. However, the winner of the school round was not declared. So, we all had to attend this next round.

The venue was a huge stadium, obviously meaning that a lot of children were going to be there. On reaching, we found out that a whooping 6000 students had qualified for this round, which meant that the competition was tough. For this round, instead of pen and paper, we had to do the test on a Samsung Tab.

The test itself was pretty much the same. Didn't feel like it was any more difficult than the previous one and our competition had definitely narrowed down to 6,000, instead of 40,000.

After the test, we had a one hour session on career options by a person named Byju, who cleared the CAT exam with a 100 percentile, twice. More on that later.

One thing that the person told us was, what we are doing in school now is not learning, we are memorizing. After the exam, we forget. But, if we use our common sense (which according to him, is not that common), we can simply learn without memorizing and we won't ever forget it.

Apart from that, it was a really good competition. I'm still waiting for the city level results although, since I didn't win at school level, my hopes aren't that high.