About
Why we started this.
There are students sitting in Sri Lankan classrooms right now who could hold their own against anyone in the world. What they were missing was a way in.
The story
The Institute for Science, Engineering, and Technology was founded in 2020 by Shenal Kotuwewatta and Sasandi Hettiarachchi.
The international science olympiads have been running for decades. For most of that time Sri Lanka had no organised way into several of them, and it was never because the talent was missing. Nobody was running the national round that turns a clever student into a team member. You could be very good at economic reasoning, or at the mathematics underneath machine learning, and go through school without ever meeting a competition that would notice.
So we started running those rounds ourselves. We write the papers, hold the national selections, train the students who get through, and travel with the teams. In 2020 that was one olympiad. It is now three, and our students have brought back medals from every cycle we have entered.
We are not a tuition class, and we have no interest in becoming one. Nobody pays us to sit a paper, and we do not coach anyone towards a paper we wrote. What we do is set a problem worth solving, put it in front of the whole country on the same day, and then take whoever solves it seriously.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2020
- Based in
- Sri Lanka
- Olympiads run
- SLEFO · SLAIO · SLLO
- International bodies
- IEO · IOAI · IOL
- Cost to students
- Free, always
Principles
How we run an olympiad.
The paper decides
Everything we run is free and open to any school in the country. A student in Anuradhapura sits exactly what a student in Colombo sits, and we mark it without knowing whose it is.
Thinking beats memorising
We write papers you cannot cram for. Given the choice, we would rather find the student who can work it out than the one who has already read it somewhere.
Selection is only half of it
Spotting talent is the easy part. Every programme runs training alongside its selection rounds, so nobody turns up to an international round underprepared.
We stay
We add an olympiad when Sri Lankan students deserve a way into a subject, and then we keep running it. None of these are one-off events.
Founders
The people who started it.
Shenal Kotuwewatta
Co-founder
Sasandi Hettiarachchi
Co-founder
Timeline
Six years, three olympiads.
- 2020
IFSET is founded
Shenal Kotuwewatta and Sasandi Hettiarachchi set up the Institute for Science, Engineering, and Technology so that Sri Lankan students have a way into the international science olympiads.
- 2020
SLEFO launches
The Sri Lanka Economics and Finance Olympiad runs for the first time and sends the country's first team to the International Economics Olympiad.
- 2021 to 2025
Medals at the IEO
Sri Lankan students take silver and bronze at successive International Economics Olympiads.
- 2025
SLAIO launches
The Sri Lanka Artificial Intelligence Olympiad opens, putting Sri Lanka among the countries competing at the newest of the international olympiads.
- 2026
First medal at the IOAI
The team comes back from Astana with a bronze for Dilina Weragama and an honourable mention for Chanitha Denagama, in Sri Lanka's first outing at the AI olympiad.
- Next
Sri Lanka Logic Olympiad
A third national selection opens, and Sri Lanka sends its first team to the International Olympiad in Linguistics.
Work with us.
We would like to hear from schools that want to enter students, from companies and universities interested in backing a national team, and from former contestants who want to help set problems.