While many seniors worked on their projects over the recent Grande Project work week, senior Daniel  Blittschau and other members of the St. Louis U. High Hack Club were busy typing away and solving puzzles in the Capture the Flag Coding Competition.

The SLUH Hack Club competed in its first competition this school year in the Missouri Cybersecurity Challenge. The competition was in a capture the flag format in which a team is given several problems that add up to points for the team if that problem is solved. Problems included tasks such as finding a system vulnerability or decoding a message. Each problem the hack club handled took anywhere from a couple of minutes to up to an hour.

 “There are definitely puzzles that are pretty easy and there are ones that are pretty difficult,” said Blittschau.

  This was the first competition that the Hack Club has been able to participate in this year due to Covid, but it was not without its abnormalities. The competition was held virtually, so each participant completed the competition from their home. 

“We really haven't been able to do real hackathons this year,” said Blittschau. “So is it kind of nice just to be able at least have something like this to work out with the team.” 

The competition was a preliminary round taking  place from Jan. 19-22. During the competition the Hack Club competed against 23 other high schools in the area. Competing their hardest, the Hack Club managed to walk away with second place. 

“Second is pretty good. I’m happy with that,” said Blittschau.

A second place finish means that the Hack Club qualified for the final competition in February. Even though the Hack Club had not been able to compete in other competitions, that did not stop them from showing out at the competition. Going into the competition the Hack Club was confident. 

“I've done multiple capture flag events in the past,” said Blittschau, “so I kind of had a pretty good rough idea of what to expect.”