On Nov. 7, Naperville North’s programming team earned tenth place in a national competition of 3,185 teams.

PicoCTF (Pico Capture The Flag), a 12-day competition hosted by Carnegie Melon University, is an online computer security competition for middle and high school students. According to the PicoCTF website, the game consists of a series of challenges where programmers must ‘reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the challenge.’ The website also said that these challenges are a great way to get a legal, hands-on experience at programming.

NNHS junior Chris Fu said the competition stretched his programming skills.

“The exercises range from a difficulty level of very easy to extremely tough. It goes from just knowing how a computer works to things like binary exploitations,” Fu said. “It requires a lot of high-level thinking, and it requires you do to some outside research.”

Senior Yasha Mostofi said that the group must solve challenges like figuring out the text underneath a picture that has been blacked out or determining out the password to a website.

According to Mostofi, the team is also working on another project called Zero Robotics, where the team must control a virtual sphere in space and take pictures of an asteroid. The team meets during or after AP Computer Science to discuss the best method to solve the problem.

“The cool thing about this competition is that if you win, [Zero Robotics] will take your code and run it on an actual space sphere by the International Space Station,” Mostofi said.

The team also competes in the Java competition sponsored by DeVry University, where each team of four programmers is given eight problems to solve within two hours.

“It’s kind of the opposite of our Zero Robotics competition, where you want to get the best approach. At DeVry, we’re more focused on time since we only have two hours,” Mostofi said.

Fu, who learned computer programming language prior to high school, said that most of the programmers on the team already have a basic understanding of programming from either an introductory programming class or a family member. However, he said that the environment is very open and that new members can participate in smaller competitions where they are coached by the team’s sponsor, Geoffrey Schmit.

Although many of the members of the programming team are in AP Computer Science, Mostofi said the team meets once a week. During these meetings, most of the competition preparation takes place.

“We want to make sure that the way we go about solving these problems is fast and efficient, especially for our DeVry competition,” Mostofi said. “We usually try and solve six or seven problems each before a competition so we are used to the problem and what it takes to solve it.”

Last year, NNHS’ two programming team placed first and second at the DeVry University competition, and they hope to accomplish the same this year.

“We want to make it to finals at our Zero Robotics competition, since we only made it to semifinals last year,” Mostofi said. “However, our goal overall is just to go out and try to expose everybody in the club to as many competition scenarios as possible.”