The Festival of Talents (FOT) is the Philippines’ Department of Education (DepEd) talent-and-skills competition for learners from Kindergarten through Senior High School. It runs at three tiers — the Division Festival of Talents (DFOT), the Regional Festival of Talents (RFOT) and the National Festival of Talents (NFOT) — and shares one set of contests and criteria across all three, so a learner who wins at division moves up to represent the region, and a regional winner moves up to represent the country, at the same event with the same rubric. With 29 live-judged or live-run contests spanning Art, Literacy, Music, Dance, Drama, Multimedia, Special Needs Education (SNED) Abilympics and more, a single division’s FOT quickly becomes a multi-venue, multi-grade-level tabulation problem — exactly the kind of cascading competition eTalenter is built to run online.
One learner, one teacher-coach, per municipality
A Division Festival of Talents draws one learner (or one team) and one teacher-coach per contest, per municipality, to represent that municipality at division level. The same one-per-area rule repeats upward: one representative per division competes at the regional level, and one per region at the national level. That’s a straightforward promotion cascade — the same shape documented for Kerala’s district kalolsavam or Karnataka’s Pratibha Karanji — just built around municipalities, divisions and regions instead of schools, districts and states.
Learner levels run by grade, not age
The FOT memorandum defines its levels by grade, not age, and several contests are restricted to one grade only. eTalenter installs the usual Philippine age for each grade as a reference, but a learner’s actual eligibility is always their grade level:
| Key Stage | Grade level | Typical age |
|---|---|---|
| — | Kindergarten | 4–6 |
| Key Stage 1 | Grade 3 | 7–8 |
| Key Stage 2 | Grades 4–6 (some contests Grade 6 only) | 9–11 |
| Key Stage 3 | Grades 7–10 (some contests Grade 10 only) | 12–15 |
| Key Stage 4 | Grades 11–12 | 16–18 |
| Combined | Grades 9–12 or 7–12 (team contests) | 14–18 |
Source: DepEd Schools Division of Sorsogon, Division Memorandum No. 70 s. 2025 — the 2025 Division Festival of Talents, which also encloses the Regional and National FOT guidelines, so one source document covers DFOT, RFOT and NFOT alike.
Sample contests by grade band
The contest list widens as the grade band rises, with individual, team and even objective-scored quiz formats mixed in:
- Kindergarten: Guhit Bulilit (Draw and Tell) — a drawing judged alongside an oral “tell” delivered in the learner’s own mother tongue.
- Grade 3: Story Retelling (English), LikhaWento — a wordless picture-story retelling (Filipino).
- Grades 4–6: Story Interpretation in Sign Language (Filipino Sign Language), Pintahusay (on-the-spot painting), Invitation Card Making, Extension Cord with Switch Assembly, Dish Gardening — individually judged; plus NumbeRace (a mathematical adventure race) and Katutubong Sayaw (Philippine folk dance) as team contests.
- Grade 6 only: TahiRawan (picture-story telling), Story Resolution Challenge, and the Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas Kwiz (a Philippine-history quiz).
- Grades 7–10: Story Interpretation in Braille Reading (Unified English Braille), the PopDev Quiz Bee; Grade 10 only adds the Five-Minute Advocacy Speech and BidyoKasiya (an advocacy video).
- Grades 11–12: Speak Up! — an impromptu speech.
- Grades 9–12: Technical Drafting (computer-aided house design), Electrical Installation and Maintenance, Bread and Pastry Production — individual; Food Processing as a 2-learner team contest.
- Grades 7–12 (team): Bayle sa Kalye (a grand dance parade), Bayle Eksibisyon (dance exhibition), Direk Ko Ganap Mo (on-the-spot acting), Likhawitan (on-the-spot songwriting and performance), Sineliksik (short film), and AGHAMazing — a STEM proposal and presentation.
The sign-language and Braille-reading contests, together with the vocational-skills contests (electrical installation, bread and pastry, technical drafting, food processing, extension cord assembly, invitation card making), sit under the memorandum’s SNED Abilympics banner — a track specifically for learners with special needs, judged and tabulated the same way as every other item.
Three different ways a contest gets scored
Unlike a kalolsavam’s single grade-and-points model, FOT runs three genuinely different scoring mechanics side by side, and a coordinator needs to know which applies to which contest before setting up Scoring:
- Weighted judges’ criteria, totalling 100: the majority of contests — Guhit Bulilit, Story Retelling, LikhaWento, Pintahusay, Direk Ko Ganap Mo, Likhawitan and more — are scored against a printed rubric. Draw and Tell, for instance, splits 50/50 between the drawing (Relevance to Theme 15, Visual Organization 15, Color Harmony 20, Workmanship 20) and the spoken telling (Delivery 30), with sub-items like Technical Drafting and Likhawitan carrying their own multi-row tables.
- Points per question, not a criteria table: the two quiz contests — Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas Kwiz and the PopDev Quiz Bee — are scored on 21 questions worth 40 points total (8 easy questions at 1 point, 7 average at 2 points, 6 difficult at 3 points), with no judges’ rubric at all.
- Placings, not marks: AGHAMazing is ranked First through Fifth by summing each judge’s individual rank for every entry (no printed bonus points per place), and the Braille Reading contest additionally carries its own percentage grade bands — Exceptional (76–100%), Proficient (51–75%), Developing (26–50%) and Certificate of Participation (1–25%) — on top of its numeric score.
SNED Abilympics contests award Gold, Silver and Bronze medals to the top three, mirroring the placing model our placings vs. grades guide walks through in more general terms.
An honest gap: one contest ships without a rubric
Invitation Card Making Using Microsoft Productivity Tools is left out of the scored setup on purpose. Its printed criteria table headers six weighted rows (30, 20, 15, 15, 15, 15) that add up to 110, not the 100 the table claims as its total, and one row (“Wise use of time/speed”) is headed 15% but its own top band scores only 5. Rather than silently correcting the memorandum’s own arithmetic, that discrepancy is left for the division’s own committee to resolve before the contest runs — a coordinator should settle it on paper first, not assume the platform has quietly fixed it for them.
What the platform doesn’t automate — and the committee still applies by hand
The memorandum prints a number of rules that fall outside standard scoring fields, and these stay the organising committee’s own job: time-overrun deductions (for example, a point per second over in Read-A-Thon performances, or the separate time tables for BidyoKasiya and Sineliksik), word-count and AI-content deductions in AGHAMazing, one-entry-per-municipality or per-region limits, the registration fee, NumbeRace’s station-by-station point table (50 points split across stations 1–9 with deductions for later finishers, plus 30 for the final presentation), group-size caps such as the 14-dancer limit, and the rank-sum method used to combine several judges’ scores into one placing. None of these need a special feature — they’re committee decisions applied before or after the platform’s own scoring, the same way time-limit buffers and tie-break rules are handled for any other event.
Setting up a Festival of Talents round in eTalenter
Build the grade-based bands in Age Groups Setup — restrict each group by class rather than a birth-date range, since FOT eligibility runs on grade level, and mark the combined Grades 9–12 and 7–12 groups as common pools for the team contests. Add Municipality → Division → Region → National as your Event Levels, the same cascading-promotion shape our multi-level competition guide covers, with winners from one tier promoted to represent the next rather than re-registering. When you Assign Competitions to Groups, set each contest’s Individual/Team type and time limit to match its own grade band, and choose rank-based Scoring Setup for AGHAMazing and the SNED medal contests instead of a weighted rubric. Chest numbers, judge assignment and result publishing then work the same way as any other eTalenter event — see the judge scoring guide and the certificate & ID card generator.
You can see a multi-level, multi-scoring-model cascade for yourself. Open a live demo and log in as a demo coordinator or judge — no sign-up required. Or compare with a grade-and-points festival on our kalolsavam management software page.
FAQ
What is the Festival of Talents (FOT)?
FOT is the Philippines’ DepEd talent-and-skills competition, run at Division (DFOT), Regional (RFOT) and National (NFOT) level, with one shared set of 29 live-judged or live-run contests across Kindergarten through Senior High School.
Is FOT scored the same way for every contest?
No. Most contests use a weighted judges’ rubric totalling 100 marks, the two quiz contests are scored by points per question (21 questions, 40 points), and AGHAMazing plus the SNED Abilympics contests are decided by placing rather than marks.
How does a learner move from division to national level?
By promotion, not fresh registration. One learner or team per municipality represents it at division level; the division winner represents the division at regional level; the regional winner represents the region at national level — the same contest and criteria run at every tier.
Running your Division, Regional or National Festival of Talents on eTalenter? Message us on WhatsApp at +91 96056 56508 or email support@etalenter.com for help with the software. We can’t help with individual entries or submissions to the official festival — for those, please contact your school or your Division Office.
