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Marshalltown High School’s IT team competed at the IT-Olympics April 27-28 at Hilton Coliseum in Ames, placing second in Game Design and seventh in Cyber Defense contests.
The IT-Olympics is the culminating event for students participating in IT-Adventures, “an innovative program that is dedicated to increasing interest in and awareness of IT among high school students through inquiry-based learning focused on three content areas: cyber defense, game design programming, and robotics.”
MHS’s IT Team, the “Kamikaze Wizards”, competed against 25 teams from schools across Iowa.
The Game Design team, made up of three ninth graders – James Talbert, Brody Gethmann, and Julio Ordaz Dirks, placed second.
The Cyber Defense team, comprised of Ben Anzis (10th grade), Sumeet Panchal (9th grade) and Aaron Schwandt (11th) finished 7th.
In addition to preparation, which included setting up webservers for Cyber Defense and creating a video game for Game Design and competing in many “real time challenges” at the actual event, the team had to complete a community service project before attending. The MHS team created the “Kamikaze Challenge” for students at Lenihan Intermediate, in which they had to create and program LEGO robots to complete a set of tasks in a given amount of time.
