(From Left to Right) Gregory York, Sander de Man, Megan Kennedy and Marshall Montgomery

The Air Force Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, or AFROTC, at Flower Mound High School participated in the second round in the Cyber Patriot competition.

Cyber Patriot is a national high school cyber defense competition created by the Air Force Association (AFA) to excite, educate, and motivate the next generation of cyber defenders and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

The competition is designed to help participating students make a seamless path from high school to college and eventually, the work force. It is also intended to provide hands-on, practical knowledge that prepares students for post-secondary education and jobs in the STEM career fields.

“I hope to be able to get a scholarship from it,” freshman Oskari Pirhonen said. “It opens up great opportunities to go to college and get a good job afterwards.”

Students competed in a number of different rounds to find vulnerabilities and system breaks in the computer system. They must also find a way to defeat them and prevent vulnerabilities and system breaks from happening again.

This year, there were a total of 1225 teams competing. The competition lasted six hours and consisted of multiple challenges. Each school competed from a computer at their school. The program results are sent to a computer in Virginia where the teams’ performance will be scored.

The first competition was on November 16^th in which they competed in the all-service-round. The FMHS AFJROTC team completed and advanced from this round into round two, which was held on December 1^st. They are awaiting the results and hope to make it through the rest of the rounds, semi-finals and consolation, to make it to the final round which is held in Washington D.C. on March 14^th, 2013.

“I really want to be able to go to Washington D.C.,” junior William Weber said. “We have some kinks in our team we need to work out, but overall I feel like we have a better chance of getting into the finals this year.”

William’s team is one of the two FMHS teams to be competing and both teams have high hopes of making their way to 1^st place in Cyber Patriot.