After a thrilling first season, the Western Hills Middle School Cybersecurity Team competed in the semifinal round of the CyberPatriot National Youth Cyber Defense Competition held Feb. 1-3 at the New England Institute of Technology.

The team earned both first- and second-place honors at the state-level competition in January and is now ranked 49th out of 600 middle school teams nationwide. At the state level, the team competed against 15 other Rhode Island schools. In the semifinal round, 848 schools across the country took part.

According to technology educator Donna Wayles, who serves as the club’s faculty advisor, the program began in September when her students in grades six and seven expressed an interest in the subject of cybersecurity.

“I was teaching things like internet safety and cybersecurity topics to my students, and they wanted to learn more,” she said. “I held an informational meeting after school to see how many students were interested and 15 came. Of those students, my ‘Amazing 7’ stayed with it. They have been dedicated and have spent Mondays and Tuesdays after school until 4 p.m. learning how to secure a computer system.”

According to Wayles, the team set its sights on competing in CyberPatriot, the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition. It is part of the Air Force Association’s National Youth Cyber Education Program, which was created to motivate students to pursue careers in cybersecurity and other fields related to the STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and math.

Wayles said she is grateful for support from the New England Institute of Technology and Jesse Roberts, assistant professor of cybersecurity. The Western Hills team was allowed to use the computer lab at NEIT – which is better able to support the needs of the students – for competitions held since November.

“Competitions were online during a six-hour window, and the students competed in teams of two to six and were scored on how well they identified and secured vulnerabilities on a virtual network,” Wayles said. “They received a ‘readme’ file that contained the scenario and the rules. They could not use any outside video or media, and they had to find and fix any malware or spyware.”

The students learned to work with Windows Server 2016, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Linux. The competition involved a series of qualifying rounds.

Wayles said she was amazed at the additional time and dedication her students put into learning their skills.

“They have actually made their own discord server so that they can chat virtually and share files among themselves. They’ve created binders of information on their own with checklists for their competitions,” she said. “They have been willing to put in the time and work at it. I’m floored by what they can do. At this point, I think they’ve learned even more than me. For these 11- and 12-year-olds to be spending six hours in a computer lab, sometimes taking an hour to find the vulnerability, that’s amazing to watch. That’s persistence.”

Wayles is excited as she looks ahead to possibilities for next year’s team. The team consists of only seventh- and eighth-graders, so the entire team can continue on again if they wish. Additionally, they will be old enough to compete in areas where they could not this year, having been limited by the 13-year-old benchmark that had been set by the competition.

“I’m looking forward to next year,” Wayles said. “We’ll be even more experienced, and the students are hoping to continue on throughout the spring in preparation for the new season’s exhibition rounds in May and June with the practice rounds that follow. It’s been a great honor to work with them.”

The students said their time on the cybersecurity team has been rewarding.

“Its been good to learn more about computers and how they run,” Jack Zukowski said. “Before we started this, I didn’t know very much about it, and we use computers every day.”

Daniel Nitiskya agreed.

“It’s interesting that you can do so much with something that we use every day,” he said.

Hannah Couitt was one of the students who received a perfect score on the Server 2016 competition in Round One, along with Jackie Prata and Vignesh Peddi. She agreed with Nitiskya and Zukowski.

“It was so much fun to learn something new, especially with computers. It felt good to get a perfect score,” she said.

Vignesh Peddi has enjoyed the rush that comes with competition.

“I found that it was really fun to do it all under pressure,” he said.

“It was definitely fun testing our skills against the other students who were all over the country,” Jackie Prata said.

The students also spoke of the dividends their experience will pay going forward.

“This teaches you how to find the vulnerabilities and prevent malicious infiltration and hackers into systems,” Henry Cheng said.

“It’s a good feeling to know that you could grow up and get a good job,” said Aiden Ranaldi, the only sixth-grader currently on the team.

The students will be honored by the Joint Cybersecurity Task Force and CyberPatriot’s sponsors in Rhode Island later this spring with an awards night. They will receive certificates and citations from local dignitaries as well.