For the second year in a row, three of North Hollywood's Cyberpatriot teams - Togo, Truman, and Balto - headed off to Baltimore for a week to compete in the National Cyberpatriot Finals. To get to this point, they had to directly compete against thousands of teams and finish in the top 12. The students got to visit Washington, D.C. and tour several Smithsonians as well as a Northrop Grumman workspace when not competing. This year, they faced the Facebook Challenge, the Cisco Networking Challenge, and the Network Security Master Challenge. Team Balto placed ninth in the nation, beating their position in eleventh place last year. Team Truman won second place overall as well as second place on the Facebook Challenge. Team Togo once again won first place overall and first place on the Cisco Networking Challenge; they also won third place on the Facebook Challenge. As a reward for all their hard efforts, the NoHo competitors got plenty of Cyberpatriot and Cyberpatriot Sponsor swag; all were also given a new laptop.
Senior Jillian Kusch participated in a special competition while there known as the Unicorn Challenge. She had to race other students to stack cakes on her head; though she didn't win, she did get a Cisco-brand backpack for competing.
The NoHo Botball team placed second in the city last Saturday in what team member Jewook Ryu described as a "miraculous" victory. In Botball, teams
build and write code for robots which must complete specific tasks, such as moving foam blocks around to the correct locations. Our team suffered some mechanical problems with their main robot, so they fell to about 5th place by the end of the competition, but they were saved by the documentation component of the challenge, put together by Tatiana Lucero. Tatiana's work also won them the Judge's Choice Documentation award.
Our Science Bowl team also recently competed, placing second in the nation. They did very well in the double elimination rounds leading up to the semifinals (W-W-L-W-W) and then won the Semifinals as well. However, the following day, they lost the final round. Team member Albert Liu seemed overall pleased with the result; he was especially excited about the white polos they received. Chaperone Mr. Maine seemed more enthused about a trip to Alaska for the whole team later this year.