A team of five students from Beehive Science & Technology has won a first-place prize in the gold tier division of the state competition of CyberPatriot. The five students are Czarina Land, Kaitlin Doddridge, Sahana Kargi, Sasha Singh and Tabarak Abdulameer. Beehive faculty member Sumeyye Guney oversees the CyberPatriot team.
Beehive also had one team that placed second in the silver tier division. Team members were Abbey Thomas, Nithya Lakireddy and Kimberly Drennan. Sumeyra Gul was the faculty member who oversees this team.
The students’ victory advances their team to the state’s semifinal round of competition. The overall competition places students in three tiers: platinum, gold and silver. Teams are placed in tiers based on the first two competitions. No Utah teams were placed in the platinum level. There were six gold level teams in Utah, and only Beehive and another school advanced to the next level.
CyberPatriot is a program of the Air Force Association. According to the association, the CyberPatriot program is designed “to inspire K-12 students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines critical to our nation’s future.”
The CyberPatriot website notes, “CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Education Program. At the center of CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition. The competition puts teams of high school and middle school students in the position of newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company. In the rounds of competition, teams are given a set of virtual images that represent operating systems and are tasked with finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities within the images and hardening the system while maintaining critical services in a six-hour period. Teams compete for the top placement (platinum level) within their state and region, and the top teams in the nation earn all-expenses paid trips to Baltimore, Md. for the National Finals Competition where they can earn national recognition and scholarship money.
