Students from throughout the CSRA gathered at the Hull McKnight Building of the Georgia Cyber Innovation & Training Center, Wednesday, to test and hone their IT skills at this year’s AFCEA TechNet Augusta High School and Middle School Capture the Flag Event.
This year’s competition had some 80 participants, from five middle schools and 21 high schools divided into 31 teams.
Part of the annual TechNet conference, the Capture the Flag Event invites young programming enthusiasts to participate in a series of technical problem-solving challenges.
In its previous five years, the event has been primarily trivia-based, focusing on cybersecurity problems. This year players were tested more on subjects such as publicly available information and open-source intelligence, notes Tim Gray, program director, as well as program manager with Parsons, the tech company which hosts and coordinates the event.
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“The point of that was to really understand the information space,” said Gray. “Cyber is the internet on your phone, your TV, all the information and data.”
By exposing the kids to the variety of avenues and disciplines that comprise the cyber field, Parsons is effectively “cultivating its workforce,” Gray says.
“I’ve seen as a trend, that every year, the younger they get, the smarter they are, because they’re around these devices all the time,” he said, citing the students’ eagerness to participate. “They’re exposed to more information.”
That familiarity with technology indeed seems to help the young contestants with developing creative ways solving the competition’s challenges. Sgt. David Koski, one of the Army Cyber volunteers mentoring players during the event, considers the prevalence of the use of ChatGPT among the students to help them understand concepts related to the competition.
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“In our line of work, we would sit there and we would ram our heads into the wall of Google trying to figure out a solution,” Koski said. “They, however, I found a much smarter solution, and just using ChatGPT to kind of say, ‘I want to get through this problem. How do I go about solving it?’”
Paul Vance, a seventh grader from Paul Knox Middle School, was a member of first place winning Sigma Team. His favorite challenge in the competition was called Wave the White Flag—“because it taught us to go through sources, and that helped us later on.” He participated in the CyberPatriot summer camp, last year, and “was excited to come back.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
