I missed posting last week’s update – I’ll blame having to prepare my taxes 😉 – so this update will be for the last 2 weeks. On Saturday, April 8 the Oregon Game Project Challenge (OGPC), sponsored in part by the OregonCSTA, held its annual Main Event at Western Oregon University in Monmouth. This year’s event, the 10th, was by far their best attended with 58 teams comprised of over 220 students and coaches from around Oregon. A reporter and film crew from the Oregonian newspaper came in the afternoon and their write up can be found here. The highlight of OGPC is the Keynote and Awards Ceremony. This year, Mark Maratea a games industry veteran with over 15 years of experience, gave an inspiring presentation about his background and what lead him to a career in making video games. After a few more short presentations and announcements, the awards were announced. 16 teams (7 middle and 9 high school) were honored with eighteen awards – 9 each for the middle and high school divisions.  More details about the winning teams can be found at the OGPC website and in their post-event press release.  For pictures of this year event as well as from previous years events, see the OGPC Flickr Group.

Speaking of gaming, I was recently contacted, through our website, by a team of students called the Techmasters from Phillips Academy, Andover.  They are running an annual online computer security competition called PACTF, which is a Capture the Flags type of Computer Security competition where you hack, decrypt, reverse, and do whatever it takes to solve increasingly challenging security puzzles.  The first round of this competition, Bartik, runs from April 16-23 and the second round, Boole, runs from April 24-30.  During each round, you can pick any two-day span to grab as many flags as you can!  Over $20,000 worth of prizes will be awarded to the top-ranking teams of each round and for the overall contest. Anyone can enter and join a team of up to 5 members; however only teams of middle and high school students will be eligible for the prizes. To see what kind of problems you will need to solve, the Techmaster team was kind enough to share some Sample PACTF Problems from the 2016 PACTF competition. The See the PACTF site to register and for more details about the competition.

Finally, we are gathering information from our network of CS educators, administrators and industry professionals to determine our 2017 Summer SuperQuest portfolio of classes.  Details about those classes and registrations for them will be available on our website by the end of April, hopefully even sooner!