In the middle of exams and end-of-semester assignments, four VIMSIA students participated in the second round of this year's CyberPatriot competition.
After a successful, socially-distanced but in-person Round 1, the team adapted to current conditions and went with a "Zoom in" version for Round 2. At the same time, this did create additional technical difficulties. The team could persevere with help from the school admin to help provide all the resources we could need. Thank you to the team’s Technical Mentor, Marc Boumedine, for last-minute firewall help. Thank you, especially to the team members who could participate: Mimi Boumedine, Lindsay Barr, Divina Kamara, and Amelie Zucker.
Even though these IB students are overwhelmed with all of their end of semester exams and assignments, yet they showed up via Zoom today, ready to go. Rebecca Hoffart, Cyber Patriot Coach, said, “I am so, so proud of them! Due to the technical issues of trying to control virtual images remotely via Zoom, we had to mostly work on only one computer image challenge at a time (normally we work on three at a time for up to six hours!)”
Typically full points in this competition on three computer images would be 300 points - with 6 hours available for each image if the team works on them all at once. Working on one at a time, the team only had 2 hours available per image. So a perfect score under those conditions might be 100 points at the absolute best.
Hoffart said, “I am so proud to say that our team scored 135 points today! This is a testament to the team members’ ability to overcome frustrations and carry on, even when the circumstances are quite difficult. According to the current Cyberpatriot scoreboard, our team competed for 5 hours and 16 minutes, via Zoom, on a Sunday, the week before midterm exams. As a reference point, the SAT exam lasts 3 hours. We have some amazing students at PGIA, and the schools were very well represented in Round 2 of CyberPatriot.”
