IPSC IT Fest 2026

As Student-in-Charge of Computer Science, I have the privilege of welcoming you to The Doon School. Beyond the events, the points and the trophies, I hope this fest reminds us of something fairly fundamental: that the best parts of life rarely come from knowing exactly what we are doing.

We will make mistakes. We will improvise. We will start over. We will find people who think differently from us, and some of us will discover that they teach us more in three days than a textbook manages in a term.

So come with ambition, but also with curiosity. Come to win, but be willing to lose. Come prepared, but leave room for the unexpected, because the events have been built to supply rather a lot of it.

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish,” as Stewart Brand put it. For three days at Chandbagh we will step outside the ordinary and build something worth remembering.

Welcome to the IPSC IT Fest 2026.

That is why the fest asks more of its participants than technical skill. Over three days, students from IPSC schools across India will compete in robotics, programming and machine learning, and work alongside people they have never met on problems none of them has seen before.

Competition matters, but it is not the whole point. We hope you leave with new ideas, new friends from other schools, and a little more confidence than you arrived with.

Our students and staff are working to make your time at Chandbagh engaging, comfortable and memorable. We look forward to welcoming you in December.

The failure itself is ordinary. Every team arriving in December will have one.

What has stayed with me is narrower than the failure: I could not have told you where it began. Not the sensor, not the threshold, not the line of logic that had stopped being true somewhere between the lab and the arena. The machine was opaque to me at precisely the moment I needed it not to be, and standing in front of it was never going to open it.

None of what would have opened it was a secret to me. Printing what the sensors were actually reading. Changing one thing and holding the rest as is. Running it again to see whether the failure came back with it. I knew all of this in the lab, where there was time and nobody was watching. In the arena, there was a clock, an audience, and a robot that had stopped making sense, and I did what most people do in front of something that has stopped making sense. I looked at it harder, as though it might be embarrassed into behaving.

Most of this fest is built around some version of that moment. The Black Box gives you a dataset broken on purpose and makes you write down where your model will fail before you are allowed to train it. The Hackathon gives you a problem you have not seen and a company of people from schools you have never gone to, and people, unhelpfully, cannot be made to print what they are thinking.

Building this fest, I kept returning to that wall, partly out of something like wisdom and mostly out of spite. Every document we have written for these events, from rulebooks to support material to arena diagrams, exists so that if your robot drives into a wall in December, it is at least a wall it has met before. No document takes the clock out of the arena, though. Or the people watching. Or the moment the thing you built simply stops answering you.

We will see you at Chandbagh in December. Something there will refuse to explain itself to you, as mine did. It might be a robot. It might be a model, or a program, or a teammate you met that morning.