A handful of Wellesley High School students recently tested their skills against those of other budding cybersleuths in the NYU High School Forensics Challenge and did themselves proud by finishing among the top teams in the world in the two-week-long online competition.
Team “Viewersisland” (Luis Hoderlein, Andy Lyu, Ethan Perry and James Sours) scored 15th worldwide, while Team “N.A.R” (Ryan Hennessey, Nick Lueth and Alden Schmidt) scored 57th. WHS teacher Dr. Robert Cohen advised the students. WHS students have participated in the competition for years, and this was the school’s second best showing to date.
The students, who each brought unique skills to the virtual table, were challenged to tackle problems in a series of real-world scenarios modeling computer security problems. They had to find sequences of characters hidden in files, on servers and in code. “The most challenging task involved reverse engineering a program,” Hoderlein says.
Hoderlein, co-president of the WHS Computer Science Club, says he hopes the teams’ success at competitions like this will get more students excited about computer science.
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