picoCTF: Teaching 10,000 High School Students to Hack

In the spring of 2013, two student-lead organizations, the Plaid Parliament of Pwning and Team Osiris, designed and hosted a computer security competition for high school students called picoCTF. Unlike existing competitions, picoCTF focuses primarily on offensive hacking skills presented in the form of a web-based video game to better excite students about computer science and computer security. Over the 10-day competition nearly 10,000 middle and high school students participated across almost 2,000 teams vying for $25,000 in prizes, making picoCTF, to the best of our knowledge, the largest hacking competition ever held. The competition introduced thousands of high school students to advanced topics such as the command-line interface, cryptographic ciphers, the client-server paradigm of the web, file system forensics, command injection, data representation, and program representation. picoCTF sets a new standard in scale and educational impact in pre-collegiate computer science.