sCTF - A cybersecurity competition promoting CS education
sCTF is an international jeopardy-style CTF run by students, for students with the goal of inspiring stronger computer science education. It started in late 2014, with the first competition being hosted in January of 2015. Since then, we have been expanding both our team and our competitor base to become the largest CTF world-wide with an emphasis on K-12 students. We design and implement problems for competitors to solve in the categories of algorithms, cryptography, digital forensics, binary exploitation, reverse engineering, web exploitation, reconnaissance, and programming languages.
Computer science education continues to be a rapidly changing area, with schools rushing to adopt harder and more standardized curricula. We’ve seen firsthand how much impact these competitions have on students and their motivation to succeed in computer science. Our staff members have been invited to speak at local schools, and both K-12 schools and universities have had students solve our problems to advance their education. sCTF encourages students to get interested in computer science, and to do it in a fun and competitive environment. It allows both a low barrier of entry into cybersecurity and a difficult problem set for experienced competitors. We love working to inspire the next generation of computer scientists and encouraging them to take creative approaches and find unorthodox solutions.