INDIA'S NATIONAL SCHOOL CHAMPIONSHIP · 2026–27
BUILDATHON
Mission Bharat 2047
Build the India you'll live in.
Academic
To be announced
Technology
To be announced
Sponsors
To be announced
Media
To be announced
Partners will be announced as each one is confirmed
Part one · The theme
Mission Bharat 2047
Build the India you'll live in.
In 2047 India turns a hundred. The students in this championship will be between thirty-three and forty-two years old. They will not be reading about that India. They will be running it.
So the mission is not to build a school project. It is to look hard at one real thing that does not work well enough — the water, the traffic, the air, the alarm that nobody trusts, the machine that was never designed for your grandmother — and to build something that makes it work better.
Every challenge hangs off that single instruction. Everything else is detail.
Ministries
One per category. Each issues three briefs — one for each age band.
Themes
Six per ministry. Each is a problem space, wide enough for two hundred different answers.
Rounds
Online calibration, regional build, national final. Each tests a different thing.
A theme is a space, not a project
“The Water We Share” is a theme. “Build a soil-moisture irrigation controller” is a project. We never give you the second kind. The directions under every theme show how wide the space is, and you earn nothing extra for building one of them. The entries that win are the ones nobody on the committee thought of.
The championship in one page
At a Glance
Schools
Ministries
Themes
Age bands
To practise
The four ministries
The three bands
Junior
Grades 3–5
Rounds 1–2
Middle
Grades 6–8
Rounds 1–3
Senior
Grades 9–12
Rounds 1–3
You do not need any hardware
Eligibility
Who Can Enter
Any student in Grades 3 to 12 at a registered school. Entry is through your school, and your school registers once for every student it enters.
- How many categories
- All four, if you want. Each is scored separately and you may reach the Regionals in more than one.
- Band
- Set by the grade you are in when your school registers, and it does not change afterwards — not even when the new session starts in April.
- Round 1
- Solo. Always.
- Round 2
- Machines and Signals & Secrets become teams of three. Code and Learning Machines stay solo.
- Where the theme comes from
- Machines: announced when the round opens, so you may build at home and bring it. All other ministries: drawn on the morning and built on the day.
- Teams
- All three members from the same school and the same band. The same three may enter as a team in Machines and in Signals & Secrets, and each may still enter Code and Learning Machines individually.
- Cost
- Practice is free. Entering costs ₹100 per student for each challenge, paid with the registration form. Regional and national participation costs are published with the registration pack.
Where the Junior journey ends
What you need
Practice is open now
Part two
The Four Ministries
Each ministry is one category of the championship. It issues three briefs — one for each age band — and opens six themes. The brief tells you what kind of thing to make. The theme tells you what corner of the mission to make it in. And each one below lets you try it, right now, in the real studio.
Machines
ROBOTICS
Things that sense the world and then do something about it. Circuits, sensors, motors, servos and a rover on a mat.
Water We Share · Power Without Waste · Alarm That Was Right · Getting There Safely · Air, Weather and What We Grow · People Technology Forgets
Read the briefs and try it →
Code
CODING
Programs that take something messy and true about the world and turn it into an answer. Blocks for Junior, Python above.
My Town in Numbers · From Here to There · Price of Everything · Twenty-Two Tongues · Patterns That Repeat · Whose Turn Is It?
Read the briefs and try it →
Signals & Secrets
HACKATHON
A treasure hunt made of ciphers. Somebody hid something; find it, then learn to hide something yourself.
Six vaults of The Ashoka Cipher
Read the briefs and try it →
Learning Machines
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Train a real model on real data — then find out who it works for, who it fails, and whether it can explain itself.
Teaching a Machine to See · Teaching a Machine to Listen · Machines That Read and Write · Machine That Chooses · Who It Leaves Out · Show Your Working
Read the briefs and try it →
Ministry One · Robotics
The Ministry of Machines
You will work in the Circuits studio, the Arduino studio and on the rover mat — all three in your browser, with sixteen simulated sensors, motors, servos, relays, buzzers and lights.
The three briefs
Grades 3–5
“Make a machine that notices something, and does something about it.”
One sensor is enough. One output is enough. What the judges want to see is that the machine reacts to the right moment — not too early, not too late.
Grades 6–8
“Make a machine that decides — and can explain the number it decided on.”
Somewhere in your machine is a threshold: if moisture < 300, if distance < 20. You must be able to say why it is that number and not another one. “It felt right” is not an answer. “We tested nine values and below 300 it watered dry soil” is.
Grades 9–12
“Make a machine that keeps working when one of its senses starts lying.”
Real sensors drift, stick, spike and die. A Senior entry is expected to have a defined behaviour for each of those — a safe state, a fallback, a confirmation step, a declared limit. You will be asked about it, and you will be asked to demonstrate it.
The six themes
Directions are shown to prove how wide each space is. They are not a list to choose from — you score nothing extra for matching one.
The Water We Share
M1Every drop, from the tap to the field to the flood.
Anything that senses, saves, moves, warns about or shares water.
Directions: tank overflow · leak detection · irrigation timing · flood warning · water quality · the queue at a shared handpump · rainwater harvesting · tracking who gets water and when
Power Without Waste
M2Energy that goes where it is needed and nowhere else.
Generating, measuring, saving or fairly sharing energy and light.
Directions: a corridor that lights only when walked · solar panel angling · classroom auto-off · a study light where the grid is unreliable · load-shedding priorities · making a bill visible · light for a street with no pole
The Alarm That Was Right
M3Noticing danger early — and being believed when you do.
The hard part is not detecting. It is not crying wolf.
Directions: gas leak · fire and smoke · a cylinder tipping · intruders · a child or animal left behind · manhole and site hazards · evacuation · an alarm people actually trust
Getting There Safely
M4Moving people and things through a space without harm.
The only theme where the rover mat is likely to be your main stage.
Directions: an unmanned level crossing · parking guidance · a bus door that knows · traffic that adapts to who is waiting · a conveyor · a queue that moves · getting a wheelchair over a step · last-mile delivery
Air, Weather and What We Grow
M5Measuring the world outside, and acting on what it says.
This theme rewards logging over time more than any other.
Directions: classroom air quality · a school weather station · a greenhouse that regulates itself · cold chain for milk or vaccines · grain-storage humidity · a heatwave warning for a worksite · predicting rain from your own data
The People Technology Forgets
M6Machines for the users a standard design leaves out.
Assistive and inclusive technology — disability, age, illness, or anyone the default excludes.
Directions: a doorbell you feel instead of hear · a cane that senses ahead · medicine reminders · a call button that actually reaches someone · one-switch control · a communication board · help for someone who has fallen · a kitchen tool for one hand
If you choose M6, read this
The challenges
Exactly what happens in each round, band by band.
Grades 3–5
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Light It Up
Eight circuit challenges in the Circuits studio, each checked automatically by the simulator the moment it works: light an LED, add a switch, two lights at once, spin a motor, make it buzz, dim the light, push to shine, and a light-and-sound show. Then one build of your own — any machine that notices something — filmed and uploaded. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Bring it, or build it here
Your theme is announced when the round opens, so your team of three may build at home and bring it — digital, physical, or both. Teams who prefer to build on the day get the full four hours in the studio. Entry Card required.
Surprise task: now let someone switch it off from across the room.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
The Junior journey ends at the Regionals, with a full zone ceremony and Junior champions in every ministry.
Grades 6–8
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Rescue Rover
Program the rover across the 240 × 180 cm mat: reach five markers, avoid the rubble, return to base, all inside a move budget. Your course layout is generated for you alone. Plus six sensor-logic circuit challenges: make a light, a motor and a buzzer respond to the right reading. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Bring it, or build it here
Theme announced at round open — build at home and bring it, or build on the day. Your machine must decide something, and your Entry Card must name the threshold and why that number.
Surprise task: one of your inputs is disabled thirty minutes in.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
Bring · Break · Defend
Themes announced in advance — bring your machine built. Day one is a six-hour extension against a constraint revealed on the spot. Day two: attack another team's machine, then defend your own.
Grades 9–12
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Closed Loop
Arduino sketch challenges built on sensor traces generated for you: debounce a noisy button, ramp a PWM output, build a threshold with hysteresis so it stops chattering, write a four-state machine — and one trace that is already failing, which you must diagnose. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Bring it, or build it here
Theme announced at round open — build at home and bring it, or build on the day. Your machine must log its own decisions; the log is part of what is judged.
Surprise task: an adversarial input set. Make it fail. Then make it not fail.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
Bring · Break · Defend
Bring your machine built. Day one extends it against a live constraint; graceful degradation is mandatory and it must have a declared safe state. Day two viva is on your control loop — a finalist who cannot explain their own loop does not win.
Why no two students get the same Round 1
Build at home — and bring it
TRY IT NOW · CIRCUITS STUDIO
Practise Machines in the real studio
These run in the real Circuits studio. The Junior eight are the exact Light It Up set — the simulator ticks each one the moment your circuit works. Middle and Senior open a sensor machine from one of the six themes with its wires pulled out: rebuild it, then decide its threshold.
8 Junior · 5 Middle · 4 Senior examples
Ministry Two · Coding
The Ministry of Code
Programs that take something messy and true about the world and turn it into an answer. Junior works in the Blocks studio. Middle and Senior write real Python, running in the browser — nothing to install.
The three briefs
Grades 3–5
“Make something playable that teaches somebody something true.”
It has to be playable — someone who has never met you must be able to pick it up and understand it. And the thing it teaches has to be true: a real number, a real rule, a real fact about the world.
Grades 6–8
“Turn messy real numbers into an answer somebody could act on.”
Data in the real world has gaps, typos and impossible values. Your program has to survive them and still produce something a person could make a decision with — plus one chart that does not mislead.
Grades 9–12
“Write something that survives bad input — and prove that it does.”
Anybody can write code that works on the example. A Senior entry is expected to handle the empty file, the wrong type, the value ten times larger than you planned for — and to show the test that proves it.
The six themes
Directions are shown to prove how wide each space is. They are not a list to choose from — you score nothing extra for matching one.
My Town in Numbers
C1Everything true about where you live is a dataset.
Skills: aggregation, filtering, averages that do not lie, one honest chart. Junior: a counting or sorting game about the town.
Directions: rainfall · bus punctuality · shop prices · attendance · waste collection · water supply hours · temperature over a year · potholes · anything you can count on your own street
From Here to There
C2A to B is a harder problem than it looks.
Skills: search, greedy versus optimal, graphs done gently, pathfinding. Junior: a maze or navigation game.
Directions: bus routing · school-run planning · a maze · train connections · delivery ordering · evacuation paths · cheapest journey versus fastest · a puzzle game about getting through
The Price of Everything
C3Money, stock, and what happens when both run out.
Skills: state over time, simulation, loops with consequences. Junior: a shop or vending-machine game.
Directions: a shop that runs out · price across a season · a budget that must balance · barter · a vending machine · a crop sold at the right moment · the cost of waste · a game economy
Twenty-Two Tongues
C4India writes in a dozen scripts. Make the computer keep up.
Skills: strings, character handling, frequency, the reality of Unicode. Junior: a word or rhyme game in your own language.
Directions: transliteration · word games in your own language · a spelling helper · letter frequency across scripts · rhymes and poetry · a dictionary · a cipher of your own · detecting which language a line is in
Patterns That Repeat
C5Kolam, jaali, block-print, tala — India has been writing algorithms for centuries.
Skills: loops, nested loops, coordinates, recursion, parameters. Junior: pen-drawn patterns — this is where Junior coding shines.
Directions: kolam and rangoli generators · jaali screens · textile repeats · fractals · a rhythm or tala machine · symmetry explorers · tessellation · generative art from local motifs
Whose Turn Is It?
C6Who gets served first, and who decides?
Skills: sorting, priority, constraints, and an explicit definition of “fair”. Junior: a turn-taking game.
Directions: a clinic queue · exam seating · sharing one computer lab · splitting a bill · ration distribution · tournament fixtures · roster rotation · a timetable · deciding whose turn it is when everyone claims it is theirs
If you choose C6, one extra rule
The challenges
Exactly what happens in each round, band by band.
Grades 3–5
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Make It Move
Ten block puzzles, each with a goal the computer can check by running your project, not by reading it: get the sprite to the flag, draw the shape, keep the score at exactly seven, make it repeat without stopping. Every puzzle is generated with different targets for every student. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Tell It in Ninety Minutes
A theme is drawn at 8:30. You build a playable one-screen game or interactive story in the Blocks studio. Judged on does it work first and is the idea yours second.
Surprise task: now make it playable using only one key.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
The Junior journey ends at the Regionals, with a full zone ceremony and Junior champions in every ministry.
Grades 6–8
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Twelve Questions
Twelve Python problems over a small generated dataset about a town that does not exist — its rainfall, its bus times, its shop stock. Loops, conditions, lists, one aggregate, and one deliberate off-by-one trap. Your town's numbers are generated for you alone. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
The Broken Dataset
Theme drawn at 8:30. A dirty dataset lands at 9:00 and must become three defensible answers and one chart, in four hours.
Surprise task: a new column appears that contradicts one of your answers.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
Build · Break · Defend
Two themes fused live. Six hours to build a tool that takes input and recommends an action, printing its reasoning. Day two: break another finalist's tool, then defend yours on edge cases.
Grades 9–12
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
The Cost of Being Wrong
Fifteen problems in three tiers — implementation, then algorithmic (sorting, search, greedy, light dynamic programming), then three debugging problems: working code that passes the sample and fails in production, with the failing input generated for you. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded · time is the tiebreak only.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Ship in Four
Theme drawn at 8:30. Four hours to a working tool that handles malformed input without crashing — and you must submit the test that proves it.
Surprise task: ten times the input size. Five minutes.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
Build · Break · Defend
Two themes fused live. Day two includes a code-reading viva: a judge picks one function from your submission and you explain every line of it.
Why Senior Round 1 asks you to read code, not only write it
Which language, and which version
TRY IT NOW · BLOCKS STUDIO · PYTHON LAB
Practise Code in the real studio
Junior examples open in the Blocks studio with the program already snapped together — press the green flag, then change it. Middle and Senior open Python Lab with a practice problem in the Round 1 style: same everywhere here, generated for you alone in the real round.
5 Junior · 3 Middle · 2 Senior examples
Ministry Three · Hackathon
Signals & Secrets
The story
The Ashoka Cipher
A message was once broken into six fragments and hidden across the country — each one locked inside a different kind of secret-keeping. Symbols. Numbers. Order. Keys. Proof. And, last, a lock whose key can be published on a wall without ever giving the message away. Six vaults. Six fragments. One key. The vaults are open. Nobody has assembled all six.
The three briefs
Grades 3–5
“Find what was hidden — and show how you knew.”
Guessing the answer earns the points. Explaining the method earns the round. Every Junior stage asks you to say, in one line, what told you the trick.
Grades 6–8
“Crack it without the key. Then hide something of your own.”
From the Regionals onwards you stop being only a solver. You design a hunt for another team — which is much harder, because you cannot build a good puzzle out of a method you only half understand.
Grades 9–12
“Break it. Then build one that cannot be broken the same way.”
Senior work is expected to name the weakness it exploited — a repeating key, an unsalted hash, a predictable seed — and then to show a design that closes it.
The six vaults
Each vault is a family of secret-keeping. Every band meets all six — at its own depth.
The Rock Edict
S1One mark standing for another.
Symbol ciphers, pictographs, keyed alphabets, the flipped alphabet, first-letter secrets, and messages hiding in plain sight.
The Pillar Count
S2Meaning hidden inside a number.
Counting codes, binary, hexadecimal, base conversion, character codes, positional tricks and numeric keys.
The Merchant's Ledger
S3Nothing changed — only rearranged.
Rail fence, route and columnar transposition, checksums, error detection, and a record somebody has quietly tampered with.
The Monsoon Signal
S4Messages over distance, with a shared secret.
Keyword ciphers, frequency analysis, crib dragging, XOR streams — and a repeating key that gives itself away.
The Mint and the Forgery
S5Making something impossible to fake.
Recognising a hash, dictionary attacks, why salt changes everything, proof of work, integrity, and spotting a counterfeit record.
The Sealed Chamber
S6Two keys — and one of them is public.
Small-scale RSA, key exchange, signatures, identity. The finale needs a fragment from every other vault.
At the Regionals, the vaults leave the screen
The challenges
Exactly what happens in each round, band by band.
Grades 3–5
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
The First Six Stages
A chained trail through all six vaults, one stage each, ending in a three-key finale. Each stage unlocks the next. Hints are available and priced — taking one costs points from that stage only, and you may read it again afterwards for free. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
The Campus Hunt
Teams of three. Codes hidden across the venue, scanned with the Curious Labs app; each scan opens the next stage. Two hours. Then, in the afternoon: hide one of your own, and watch another team try it.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
The Junior journey ends at the Regionals, with a full zone ceremony and Junior champions in every ministry.
Grades 6–8
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Eight Stages
Cracking a shift with no key given, the flipped alphabet, the fence, the keyword lock, robot speech, the postcard wrapper, the broken courier — and a double-locked finale. Every ciphertext is generated from your own login. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Signal and Noise
Teams of three. Intercepted transmissions hidden around campus — one of them is a decoy, and opening it costs you. Morning solve, afternoon build: design a two-stage hunt for another team.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
The Vault
A six-hour multi-stage hunt where stages unlock in parallel, so a team has to split up and trust each other's working. Then build, break and defend, like every other ministry.
Grades 9–12
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Eight Stages, No Mercy
A hex dump, an XOR stream, Vigenère with no crib, naming a hash from its shape, a dictionary attack, the same hash now salted, proof of work, and small-scale RSA. Grades 11–12 continue into an extension set: block-cipher modes, a format flaw, and a gently-taught timing side channel. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Cold Storage
An encrypted archive and a set of physical artefacts; neither opens without the other. A surprise stage lands ninety minutes in. Afternoon: build a vault of your own that states which weakness it closes.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
The Vault
Includes one stage that cannot be brute-forced in the time available — only reasoned through. Day two: attack another team's vault and defend your own design to the jury.
Hints, and what they cost
What this ministry is not
TRY IT NOW · ASOKA'S CIPHER
Enter Asoka's Cipher
Six vaults, eighteen seals, one forgotten message. Choose Junior, Middle or Senior inside the game, then take the timed hunt or explore every vault freely. No login needed — your progress is saved in this browser, and the field journal exports your answers and notes.
Ministry Four · Artificial Intelligence
Learning Machines
You will train real models on real data in the Neural Lab — image, sound, pose, object and text classifiers, clustering, nearest-neighbour, and the tools to take your own model apart afterwards.
The three briefs
Grades 3–5
“Teach a machine to help someone — then find the one thing it gets wrong.”
Finding the mistake is not failure. It is the second half of the task, and it carries marks.
Grades 6–8
“Train it, then prove who it works for and who it doesn't.”
A model that is 92% accurate is 100% wrong for somebody. Your job is to find out who, show the evidence, and say it out loud.
Grades 9–12
“Ship a model with a published model card, and defend your choice of metric.”
Your card must state the intended use, an explicitly out-of-scope use, the data it learned from, and a measured failure mode. A finalist who says “we used accuracy” and cannot justify it will not place.
The six themes
Four domains and two lenses. You draw one — but the two lenses are applied to your entry whichever one you drew.
Teaching a Machine to See
A1Anything a machine ought to be able to look at and understand.
Directions: sorting waste · spotting a crop problem · counting · reading a meter or a form · recognising a sign · an attendance aid · quality checking · noticing that something has changed
Teaching a Machine to Listen
A2Anything it should hear — and anything it should say back.
Directions: a spoken command in your own language · a sound that means trouble · reading text aloud for someone who cannot read it · birdsong or machine noise · music · a voice interface for someone with no keyboard
Machines That Read and Write
A3Anything made of words.
Directions: sorting messages · spotting a scam · sentiment on real comments · translation between Indian languages · summarising · answering from a document · autocomplete · what a tokenizer does to Devanagari
The Machine That Chooses
A4Anything it recommends, ranks, filters or decides.
Directions: what to watch or read next · which student needs help first · sorting applications · a filter bubble you can watch forming · matching people to resources · finding the feedback loop it creates in itself
Who It Leaves Out
A5 · lensEvery model helps somebody and costs somebody. Name both.
Interrogate: Take any domain and interrogate it: skewed training data · a threshold that quietly excludes a group · accuracy that hides failure on a minority · consent, and whose data it was · a hiring, admission, loan or selection model examined honestly
Show Your Working
A6 · lensA model that cannot explain itself has not finished.
Interrogate: Why did it predict that · which pixels or words decided it · did it learn or did it memorise · what the confusion matrix actually says · a published model card · a machine that says “I don't know” instead of guessing
The rule that makes this ministry different
The challenges
Exactly what happens in each round, band by band.
Grades 3–5
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Teach the Machine
A guided run through the image and pose trainers with checkpoints the platform marks: train a three-class model, get it right on held-out examples the platform supplies, and then answer five picture questions about why it got one of them wrong. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
The Kind Classifier
Theme drawn at 8:30. Three hours to train a model that helps somebody — sorting recycling, spotting a raised hand, naming a leaf — and then to show one thing it gets wrong and say why. The “say why” is judged as heavily as the model.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
The Junior journey ends at the Regionals, with a full zone ceremony and Junior champions in every ministry.
Grades 6–8
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
The Bias Hunt
Train a classifier, then hunt. The platform hands you a dataset that has been deliberately skewed — you must find the skew, show it with the balance and accuracy tools, and report what it does to the model. Your dataset's skew is chosen for you alone. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Whose Data?
Theme drawn at 8:30. Four hours to collect your own small dataset at the venue, train on it, test it, and write a one-page honest model card.
Surprise task: the judges test your model on a group you did not collect from.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
Build · Break · Defend
Two themes fused live. Six hours for a working model plus a documented failure analysis — the analysis is worth more than the accuracy. Day two viva is on your confusion matrix.
Grades 9–12
ROUND 1 · ONLINE
Model with a Conscience
Three tiers. Train and evaluate with precision and recall, not accuracy alone. Then move a decision threshold and account for exactly who that helps and who it harms. Then explain a single prediction — which feature decided it. Datasets are generated per student. 120 minutes · solo · auto-graded.
ROUND 2 · REGIONALS
Deploy It
Theme drawn at 8:30. Four hours to an end-to-end system with a stated intended use, a stated out-of-scope use, and a measured failure mode.
Surprise task: an adversarial input set.
ROUND 3 · NATIONALS
Build · Break · Defend
Two themes fused live, with a published model card required. Day two viva with academic partners: defend your choice of metric. This is where the title is decided.
What a model card is
About data and people
TRY IT NOW · NEURAL LAB
Practise Learning Machines in the real studio
Each example opens a real Neural Lab experiment — training runs on your own machine, nothing is uploaded. None of these need a camera or microphone, so they work on any school computer.
2 Junior · 3 Middle · 3 Senior examples
Part three
The Three Rounds
The three rounds are deliberately different kinds of test. One measures skill, one measures application, one measures invention. A student who is only good at one of them will not reach the end — and that is the point.
Calibration
Your own school · 120 min
Solo · marked by machine
Application
12 zones · one day
Teams · judged by people
Invention
Two days · one stage
Build · Break · Defend
How many go through
| STAGE | SCHOOLS | STUDENTS | HOW THEY ARE CHOSEN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | 500+ | every entrant | Anyone whose school registers. No qualification needed. |
| Regionals | ~280 | ~2,400 | Round 1 rank within your zone, plus the best in each school, plus a wildcard pool. |
| Nationals | ~90 | ~192 | Regional winners and runners-up, Middle and Senior bands only. |
Why we do not simply take the national top 2,400
Round one · Online
Calibration
Every entrant in the country, from their own school or their own home, on learn.curiouslabs.online. Marked entirely by machine — the only honest way to grade thirty-six thousand students in ten days.
How it runs
- A window, not a sitting. The arena is open for ten days. You take your 120 minutes any time inside it; the clock runs on our server, not your browser.
- Solo. Always. No teams in Round 1, in any ministry.
- Enter as many ministries as you like. Each has its own 120 minutes and its own score.
- If your connection drops, your progress is already saved on the server. Log back in and carry on.
How it is marked
- Every challenge is generated for you alone, from your own login. Your neighbour solves the same kind of problem with different numbers.
- Points per challenge, with hints at a published price, costing points on that challenge only.
- Scores are normalised inside your band. A Junior score and a Senior score are never compared.
- Time is the tiebreak only — never a score in itself.
| MINISTRY | JUNIOR · 3–5 | MIDDLE · 6–8 | SENIOR · 9–12 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Machines | Light It Up | Rescue Rover | Closed Loop |
| Code | Make It Move | Twelve Questions | The Cost of Being Wrong |
| Signals & Secrets | The First Six Stages | Eight Stages | Eight Stages, No Mercy |
| Learning Machines | Teach the Machine | The Bias Hunt | Model with a Conscience |
What your school must do before the window opens
Round two · Regionals
Application
One day, at a partner campus, in one of twelve zones. Everything runs on the Curious Labs platform; the venue supplies the clock, the pressure and the audience.
08:30
The draw
09:00 – 13:00
The build · four hours
14:00 – 15:30
Surprise task
16:00
Judging & ceremony
The draw — and the one exception
The surprise task
Teams
What you hand in
Round three · Nationals
Build · Break · Defend
Two days, one national campus, Middle and Senior bands. Three acts — and the second one is the part no other school championship in the country runs.
Build — Day One, six hours
Two themes are drawn live and fused — “The Water We Share × Who It Leaves Out.” Nobody has prepared for the pair, because the pair did not exist until the draw. At the three-hour mark a constraint is injected — your sensor starts lying, your input grows tenfold, a column contradicts your answer. You ship anyway.
Break — Day Two morning, ninety minutes
Each team receives another team's entry and its Entry Card, and has ninety minutes to find a failure the builders did not declare in box 4. Points for finding one. Points for having survived one. There is a floor: a team whose entry breaks badly is capped, never eliminated.
Defend — Day Two afternoon
An eight-minute demonstration and a seven-minute viva to a jury that includes our academic partners — and that has already read your Entry Card and the report written by the team that attacked you.
Why the middle act exists
National titles
4 ministries × 2 bands
Regional titles per zone
4 ministries × 3 bands
National Champion School
Across every ministry and band
Part four · Rules
The Entry Card
Every Round 2 and Round 3 entry carries one. Four boxes, filled in on the platform, submitted with the build. It is how a very wide theme stays fair to judge — every entry answers the same four questions, whatever it turned out to be.
Who is this for?
A named, specific person or group. Not “everyone”. “My grandmother, who cannot hear the doorbell” is an answer. “The public” is not.
What does it sense or read?
Your inputs. The sensors, the dataset, the file, the question. If it learns from data, say whose data it was and how you asked.
What does it decide or do?
The logic, in one sentence. If there is a threshold, state the number — and, for Middle and Senior, why it is that number and not another.
What does it get wrong?
10 MARKSThe honest failure mode. When does it fail, and who does it fail? Naming a real weakness scores. Claiming there is none does not.
Why box 4 is worth marks
And at the Nationals, it becomes the weapon
Scoring & Judging
Rounds 2 and 3 — the rubric, out of 100
The same rubric at every centre, in every zone, published here in advance and never changed mid-competition.
How judging is run
The school score
Fair Play
Round 1 runs unproctored, in thirty-six thousand homes and classrooms. We can still stand behind the result, and this is exactly why.
Every challenge is built for you alone
+ the challenge
the answer never leaves it
Same puzzle, same method, different letters. A copied answer does not fit your lock. Sharing a method helps you both — and that is called studying. Try it in the Ashoka Cipher ↑
Allowed
- ✓ Paper, pens, a calculator, your own notes.
- ✓ Writing your own Python in the Code studio to help you solve a Signals puzzle.
- ✓ Taking a hint. It is priced, it is published, and it is a legitimate tactic — not a confession.
- ✓ Talking to your teacher before the round about how a method works — and entering every ministry, in a team in more than one.
Not allowed
- ✗ Another person sitting your attempt, in the room or remotely.
- ✗ Submitting work built by a parent, a coach or anyone who is not on your team.
- ✗ Sharing your account, or using someone else's.
- ✗ Submitting someone else's project as your own — or anything aimed at a live computer, account or network.
Signals & Secrets is a puzzle competition, not a hacking competition
And the real proctor is the Regionals
If something goes wrong
Awards & Recognition
Most of what a student takes away from this championship is not a trophy. It is a record of what they can do that somebody else can verify.
National titles
4 ministries × Middle and Senior
Regional titles
12 zones × 4 ministries × 3 bands
Round 1 completers
get a certificate, whatever they scored
The Skill Passport — the part worth keeping
Every certificate carries a QR code linked to a signed Skill Passport. Anyone — a school, a university admissions office, an employer — can scan it and land on a Curious Labs page that confirms the credential is genuine and unaltered. It is cryptographically signed, so it cannot be edited, forged or invented.
For schools
For teachers
Part five · Taking part
The Calendar
Built around the board-exam window, not in spite of it. Classes 10 and 12 sit boards from roughly mid-February to mid-April, so the championship deliberately goes quiet across those two months.
OPEN NOW
Registration opens
Schools onboard, rosters uploaded, practice promoted.
7–27 OCT 2026
Round 1
Three weeks, online, from school or home.
DEC 2026
Results
Results, certificates, regional selection.
MID–LATE JAN 2027
Regionals
12 zones, before the board window opens.
FEB–MAR 2027
Quiet period
Board exams. Nothing is scheduled.
LATE APR 2027
Nationals
After boards close, before the summer break.
Two consequences, stated plainly
Dates your school must diarise
Every date is marked TBC until the Organising Committee confirms it. Any change will be published at least 21 days before it takes effect, and your coordinator will be emailed directly.
Part five · Taking part
How Your School Registers
Entry is at school level. One registration covers every student the school enters, in every ministry and every band. The entry fee is ₹100 per student for each challenge they enter, paid when you register.
- 1
Nominate a coordinator
One teacher who will be our single point of contact. They receive the schedule, the dry-run links, the results and the regional invitations.
- 2
Register the school
Name, city, board, approximate student numbers per band, and which ministries you expect to enter. Also — honestly — how many working devices you have and what your internet is like. That last answer decides how we support you, and it is never used to judge you.
- 3
Upload your roster
One spreadsheet: name, grade, section. The platform generates a login for every student and a class code for every section.
- 4
Practise — it is open right now, and it is free
Every studio and the whole practice arena are already live. A student who works through the practice trails will have met every idea Round 1 uses.
- 5
Complete both dry runs
Twenty minutes each, on the real arena, four weeks and one week before. They exist so that a firewall, a browser or a login problem is found in practice rather than in the middle of a child's attempt.
What your students need
Required
- • A computer or tablet with a current browser
- • An internet connection — it does not need to be fast
- • Their Curious Labs login
Not required
- • Any robotics kit, sensor or microcontroller
- • Any paid software, licence or cloud account
- • Anything installed on the machine
Register your school
Fill in the registration form — school, principal, mentor, students, categories and payment. You get a reference number and a confirmation email straight away.
Part five · Taking part
Questions We Are Asked
We have no robotics lab. Can we enter Machines?
Yes, completely. All six Machines themes are built in the browser, with sixteen simulated sensors, motors, servos and relays. You are on exactly the same footing as a school with a lab. If you do own kit, you may put your build on real hardware at the Regionals — it earns no extra marks.
Can one student enter all four ministries?
Yes. Each has its own 120 minutes in Round 1 and its own score, and a student can reach the Regionals in more than one. A group of three can also enter as a team in both team ministries and still compete individually in the other two.
Our internet is unreliable. What happens?
Your attempt state lives on our server, not in your browser. If the connection drops, log back in and carry on inside the same window. Round 1 is a ten-day window rather than a fixed sitting for exactly this reason.
What does it cost?
Practice is free, for every student. Entering costs ₹100 per student for each challenge they enter, paid when the school registers — so a team of three entering two challenges is ₹600. Costs for attending the Regionals and Nationals are published with the registration pack.
My child changes grade in April. Which band?
The one they were in when the school registered. Band is fixed at registration and never changes between rounds — including across the April session change, which falls between the Regionals and the Nationals.
How do you stop students sharing answers?
Every Round 1 challenge is generated from the student's own login, so two students at the same desk hold different numbers and different ciphertext. A copied answer does not fit your lock. Sharing a method does work — and that is studying, which we are in favour of.
Can a parent or coach help build the entry?
No. They can teach, before the round. They cannot build. The surprise task, the viva and box 4 of the Entry Card are all designed to find out — and they reliably do. An entry a student cannot explain does not score, whoever made it.
Do Grades 3–5 really not go to Nationals?
Correct. The Junior championship is decided at the Regionals, where every zone crowns Junior champions in all four ministries — same stage, same trophies, same ceremony.
Something is still unclear.
In association with
Our Partners
Partners are announced as they sign
“Look hard at one real thing that does not work well enough — and build something that makes it work better.”
Curious Labs Buildathon
Mission Bharat 2047 — build the India you'll live in.
OFFICIAL RULE BOOK · EDITION 1 · 2026–27 · BINDING FOR THE 2026–27 CHAMPIONSHIP. CHANGES PUBLISHED 21 DAYS IN ADVANCE.