We used to call this an Olympiad. We stopped, because of what that word means inside an Indian school.
Schools are approached constantly by paid Olympiad companies — a couple of hundred rupees a student, a commission for the coordinator, a certificate at the end. So when an unfamiliar company offers a free Olympiad, a sensible principal assumes the catch is somewhere they have not spotted yet. That is a reasonable thing to assume, and it was our fault for using the word.
So here is the plain description instead.
One computer period. Grades 6 to 8. Every student is given a small amount of money and a market with real prices, and they run a drinks stall for three trading days.
They buy stock and work out what one lemon costs. They mix a recipe in a ratio and find out what happens when they change it. They set a price against a rival stall. They try a discount and discover it can fill the stall and still lose money. At the end of each day the ledger is opened and taken apart line by line — what came in, what the drinks cost, what the stall itself cost — and every line is named.
That last part is a profit and loss statement, built out of numbers the child produced themselves. No worksheet gets that.
Everything above is Class 6 to 8 arithmetic doing a job:
Nothing on screen looks like an exam. There is no question paper and no multiple choice. But a child who has held a 20% margin for three days against a rival has demonstrated something a worksheet cannot ask for.
Laburnum Public School in Gurugram and St. George's College, Agra went first. Both ran a single period with middle-school sections, with us in the room. Both coordinators are happy to be rung up by any school considering it.
You can read what happened on the first schools page.
It costs the school nothing, and the students nothing, permanently. Not a trial and not a freemium tier that expires.
What we eventually sell is a progress report to parents who want one. The part that matters to a school: we never take parent contact details from the school, and we never contact a parent. Children carry home a certificate; if a parent chooses to scan the code on it, they start their own account with their own consent. We will put that commitment in writing on our letterhead, and if a parent ever tells you we approached them without them starting it, we will withdraw from your school.
Less than you might expect. One section, one period, and a week that suits your timetable — not a fixed date, because you know your datesheet and we do not. We bring a mobile hotspot and spare laptops, and we test in your lab the day before so the surprises happen when no children are watching.
If the class is flat, that is the end of it and you never hear from us again.
A certificate for every child who plays. A report showing which maths concepts the cohort handled and which they did not. A one-page activity note you can file as evidence of experiential, competency-based learning under NEP 2020, written by us rather than by your staff. And photographs with a paragraph for the school newsletter, within 24 hours.
There is one more gap worth naming. NCFE's national financial-literacy assessment begins at Class VIII. For Classes 6 and 7 there is essentially nothing standard. That is exactly where this sits.
Everything we write about here, your child can go and do. Free, no signup, ten minutes.
▶ Play Lemonade Empire