On Friday, November 3rd the ECTS Computer Programming group competed in our second ever Cyber Patriot competition. After learning from our first competition that some of the things we needed to do required requests that were blocked by the ECTS network, we connected with our sponsors at Gannon University and they set up an area in one of the computer labs of their awesome IHACK building for the team to compete there.
The team is composed of Srikar Rallapalli, Keegan Vilushis, Isaac Trost, Arpan Uprety, Mason Melaragno, and Weston Kilgas, with Brian Thiessen being the Cyber Patriot mentor.
Due to the many possible scheduling conflicts, we stuck to our plan of competing from 12:30 to 4:30 Friday afternoon, but instead set up camp at Gannon. The students who were able to drive themselves met the team there, and our teaching assistant, Mr. Hart, drove the others down. I joined shortly thereafter, once I was able to square away the remaining class and take care of the ECTS 9th grade tours.
This time around, I was surprised to find there were 3 virtual images to be worked on. They were Windows 10, Server 2022, and Debian 11. I later learned we can find out what images will be in the competition here: https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/competition/current-competition/challenges-by-round
Considering this was only our second experience in the competition and that this stuff is hardly an area of focus in the computer programming course, I thought the team again did exceptionally well. They scored 171 points total out of 300, with just hours left in the competition, they are currently in 10th place (out of 55) in PA, and 1024 (out of 3017) overall. This is really good…especially since they are going up against teams who spend WAY more time on this competition and have years of experience. We also may get some additional points for the 30/30 Keegan was able to score (with a little help from Srikar) on the Cisco netacad Networking quiz.
Gannon did a nice job having everything ready, and the environment was fantastic for the students to work in, but this round was not without its mistakes for us to learn from.
- The netacad quiz is found under the “I’m Learning” tab. It took us a bit to figure this one out.
- Make sure you have the right version of the Packet Tracer program…while we may not have crushed this challenge, we found out late that we had the wrong version of packet tracer, so we could not even attempt it to learn what it was all about.
- Use a common password when you have to change a password for a system, and write all changed creds down during competitions. We probably should have learned this last time around. There was a moment where we signed out of a system and then that student had to leave, but we could not sign back in to shut it down before the 4hr clock expired. We had to just force close the virtual machine to disconnect the scoring bot and make sure it wasn’t active past our deadline.
- Use the lists! The students had prepared task lists to help them check off processes they needed to do, but then they did not use them until late in the competition. Had they used them earlier in the match, they may have scored even more points.
Ultimately, I think this was a great experience. I think the team performed well and doing it at Gannon was just awesome! Our next competition (State Round) is just over a month from now. It will be December 8th, and this time we have already set it up with Gannon to compete there. The images will be Server 2022, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 20. We will be placed in a tier (Silver, Gold or Platinum…but most likely Silver) based on the scores of our first few rounds. The top teams from that competition will go to Nationals….I can’t wait!
