Saturday, April 26, 2008

IT Olympics

This weekend I participated in a really cool event. I volunteered to be a mentor for the IT-Olympics in Ames, Iowa. The IT Olympics is a competition among 25 high schools across Iowa, that compete in 3 venues: Game Design, Robotics and Cyber Defense. It is a really cool way to get young kids excited about IT and enforce the need to promote IT, IT as a career choice, and let kids demonstrate their talent. I attempted to help the Cyber Defense team for the high school I was helping and they did a GREAT job. There is a documented scenario and limited architecture that the kids put together and then on competition day, the "red" team, a group of event hackers, are let loose to try and penetrate the computers run by the high school. All of the kids setup systems yesterday and then had to fend off the hackers from 8-4 today (closed/controlled environment).

Details of the event can be found on the IT-Adventures website here. If anyone would like further details please let me know.

It was a really fun event that I just wanted to give a quick mention to in hopes of promoting the idea and giving credit to all of those involved in the event. Congratulations to the team I helped, and all for all off their hard work, long hours, and dedication.

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