Week 1

We are team Osiris at the Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University. For the next 15 weeks, we are going to work with one of the best computer hacking teams in the world – PPP (Plaid Parliament of Pwning) from CMU – Cylab. Together we will create the first nationwide, high school Capture The Flag hacking competition – PicoCTF.

This week, we named the team Osiris, which is the name of the first hovercraft in the filmĀ The Animatrix. The Osiris is the beginning of the epic story, similar to our team who will be creating the first hacking competition of its kind. We also hope to set the groundwork for the possibility of future ETC projects with Cylab.

On Friday we had our first client meeting. We met PPP President Tyler Nighswander, Chairman Peter Chapman, and the rest of the PPP team as well as our client representative Prof. David Brumley. Our client helped us by giving some basic information about the competition. Together we went over the question categories and some sample problems. This was very insightful and got the whole team excited about the potential of the project.

For the next week, we will start brainstorming about game design, user experience, and art style. We are looking forward to merging game elements with computer hacking to make a competition that provides an interesting, educational, and authentic experience about computer science.

Newsletter_Week 1