We did it!

Well, maybe not what you think we mean by “it.” The final project is still on our distant horizon, but we’re now one step closer, because we finally presented our preliminary design report to our liaison engineer at Raytheon! It was extremely well-received and we got some solid positive feedback, which we’ll look into here. 

Firstly, we gained some further insight as to what happens in a typical CTF when Raytheon hosts one. Apparently, some of the challenges can be “brute-forced.” That is, on occasion contestants will try a long list of answers hoping that eventually one of them will work. This doesn’t really support anyone’s learning, so the idea came up that we should have a way of catching someone doing this. Also, the way things currently are, if someone enters a long list of random characters, but the correct answer is within those characters, they will get credit for solving the challenge. We want to prevent this from happening so nobody can just dump a dictionary on each question to pick up easy points. 

We were able to ask our sponsor who the CTF is truly intended to be used by. Turns out, it’s for pretty much anyone who signs up! Apparently it isn’t used as a strict Q&A tool; it’s more of a capstone event covering specific content from their course’s curriculum. While the idea of making the CTF be a running system which teaches students as they use it was brought up and piqued their interest, we’ll likely be sticking with the platform as a capstone assessment so we can focus our efforts on other foundational changes. Most often, there are 4 teams of about 3 people each, and never more than 13 teams at once. The fact that teams can work together and students can teach each other is one of the most valuable aspects of the system and we intend to maintain that, if not improve upon it.

This process also brought some new ideas and topics to the table. All-in-all, the ball is rolling on this project and Pythax is eagerly looking forward to being yet another step closer to our final project.