Unlocking The Brain At The Speed Of Thought - IQ Master 2016

IQ Master 2016 was an intra-university cognitive contest initiated by the Rotaract Club of University of Moratuwa. This was the very first time such kind of event was organized by a university based movement in the Sri Lankan history. Project chairpersons were Rtr. Sudara Withana—my friend and Rtr. Chevindu Wickramathilaka—myself. It was such an honour to get chosen as a chairperson for the first time, for a project that is done for the first time. For that, we are grateful to Rotaract Mora.

When I first joined Rotaract Mora, I just wanted to become a part of something big; to become a cogwheel in a bigger mechanism. And I became just that. After some time, I wished there were projects related to my favorite kind of study: brain trickery. There were none. Then the idea of IQ Master was brewing in our Vice President Rtr. Tharuka Dilshan’s innovative mind, and after many sleepless nights and lots of team-effort, that idea became a successful reality.

The main idea behind IQ Master was to induce the interest on rational thinking. This faculty is simply based on logic, reasoning and sometimes intuition; not knowledge. This is the main difficulty we had to face when explaining to our friends what IQ Master is. So let me clarify it again for future references.

IQ Master is not about your knowledge, it is about your genuine self. You do not need to be the batch-top to get throned as the winner, and this year’s event proved it in front of our very eyes.

We planned the competition to be of two main phases. First phase was to check the contestants’ logical approach towards the questions. These questions were chosen from a question pool assembled by Rtr. Chirath Diyagama and Rtr. Damitha Lenadora. The second phase consisted of memory games, patterns and some other surprises. Many of the undergraduates had never even heard about this Sri Lankan traditional puzzle named “Magul Parakkuwa”. The two teams that made it to the final round of IQ Master got lucky enough to experience the mechanism first hand.

Initiating a new project is never an easy task. You have no past events to get experience from and people do not know what you are delivering. Because of that, people become reluctant to join the project. Therefore we had to have an effective social media PR plan and a poster campaign to get the correct word out. I am happy to say it worked out well. Though there were some drawbacks due to our lack of experience in certain areas, the overall event was a success. As I mentioned during the event, we are practicing, we are learning, we are improving.

The giant pillars of inspiration behind the scenes were our two Club Service Directors, Rtr. Sudaraka Jayatilake and Rtr. Amindha Jayasena. Kudos to them for being very informative and helpful until the end of the event. And at last but never least, I must salute our organizing committee. It was not large; but was very powerful. I believe everyone had a good time messing with their brains and I would like to ask all of you to have high hopes for a bigger and a better IQ Master 2017.