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| Cyber Patriots advisor Mr. Slone stands with our 1st place team, consisting of Connor Weaver, Ryan Lapchynski, Ryan Erno, Marc Ayala, Quan Nguyen, and Daniel Ayala. |
CyberPatriots is a national Cybersecurity competition sponsored by the Air Force Association where students compete to find system vulnerabilities. Thanks to the students' amazing performance, the students now get to move onto regional competition, where they will have a shot at getting into the CyberPatriot National Competition. According to Mr. Slone, this competition is very hard to get into, but our students have a great chance at doing just that.
"The qualification for earning at seat at the national competition is to score within the top 13 of 4,404 teams nationally. To put this request in perspective, one of our teams ranked 37th nationally during the last state round competition. That same team earned first place in Ohio and our other team on track for nationals earned third place in Ohio," he explained.
The students are indebted to their head coach, Dr. Kowal, who works with them. Connor Weaver, one of the students on the first place team, praised Dr. Kowal's coaching technique, explaining that "Dr. Kowal teaches us about the images we're practicing in order to challenge us and prepare us for competition. He makes complex things, like setting up a network, sound like an everyday simple task." Dr. Kowal has also been able to bring in mentors from the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), who have helped mentor the students as they prepare for competition.
DRSS has two other teams who will advance to regional competition tomorrow, including the DRSS team that placed third at the platinum level, as well as the school's first all-female team, which placed fourth in the silver tier, but earned a wild-card spot that allowed them to advance to regionals.
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| Sam Furtaw, Stephanie Tullis, Aidan Schubert, Adam Mitchell, and Austin Davis placed third out of all the teams who competed in the state level competition. |
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| The schools first all-female team placed fourth at the silver tier of competition. The team consists of Danielle Lindsey, Carissa Ritter, Cara Stedman, and Kellyn Brokenhagen. |
The school's middle school team also performed well in competition, earning the second place spot in the state! They will advance on to semi-finals tomorrow.
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| The middle school team placed second overall and moves on to semi-finals next. From left to right: Xander Tipton, Pushar Shirahatti, Peter Cooper, Jackson Kauflin, Caleb Gindelberger, and Vraj Shah. |
The school is grateful to the Dayton-Wright Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) for providing a generous grant to DRSS, a portion of which is allocated to support the activities and competitions for DRSS's CyberPatriot teams. AFCEA's financial contribution means that the teams can focus on improving their skills and continue to explore the cybersecurity and computer science paths.
Congratulations to all our CyberPatriots teams on their amazing performance, and good luck to them in their regional competition tomorrow!
