When I was a teen, I learned about computers by trying things, breaking things, and fixing them again – relentless curiosity and experimentation, backed up by computers being much more open to investigation, allowed me to learn and grow.

Today’s computers are a lot more polished and a lot more safe, and I get why – most folks don’t want to think about the command line, don’t care about binary, and don’t even know about packet sniffing.

But I’m really keen to bring back the same experiences I had for a new generation, so I decided to do something about it: I built a huge “capture the flag” game that teaches kids 13+ how to do SQL injection, how to use rainbow tables to figure out hashes, how to use steganography to hide data in images, and more.

My goal was to take just a little of the glorified theatre you usually see in movies – the look and feel of games I loved like Syndicate, Command & Conquer, and Uplink – and mix it in with real-world skills around networking, cryptography, digital forensics, and more, to create something that teaches kids core computer science skills in a fun way.

I want to talk about my goals when building the app, some of the challenges I hit, the technology that’s used, and more – I hope it’s useful!

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