Camelot wins again on FBI computer test

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BROOKINGS – Camelot Intermediate School is once again the top national winner of the National FBI Safe Online Surfing award (FBI-SOS).

According to a press release from the FBI that was issued on Feb. 25, the fifth-grade “students’ composite score of 89.85% beat out every other participating school in the country in (the large school) category for the month” of January 2021.

Fifth-graders at Camelot also won this national award in the small school category in December 2019.

Camelot’s computer science teacher Ross Peterson was the instructor in charge of this year’s contest.

“The grand scope is still a standard that we teach with digital citizenship, so we go through a bunch of different scenarios and lessons, different kinds of approaches to cyberbullying, developing a strong password – all sorts of things about being smart when using a computer is what it comes down to,” Peterson said.

“Once again, the black team, right around January – the first two weeks that we got back we did a little exercise and then had them do a 30-question test that the FBI puts out and with our 115-120 kids on our team, we ended up first in the country with over 100 participants. There’s a category of 25 students, there’s a category of 50, and then (a category) of 100-plus – and obviously our school is big enough for that,” Peterson said.

The press release also said that there were “a total of 159,365 students in 2,227 schools in all 50 states and four U.S. territories took the exam nationwide to compete for the award.”

“I think our percentage came out to about 89%, and that got us first place for our division,” Peterson said. “And talking with FBI personnel, they said that this was the first time that they’ve had back-to-back winners in the same school. You might have a school that wins one year and then three or four years later they win again, but not back-to-back years,” Peterson added.

“This year because of COVID, we actually did a Zoom call with a supervisory special agent out of Minneapolis. We went down to the gym, put it on the big screen, and we had sent the agent some questions from the kids and she answered them to the best of her ability,” Peterson said. “I think she gave some very good information to our learners, one of them being that anything you put out there is probably going to be found, so to be smart.”

Peterson said that he used the previous class’ experience to inspire the current class to achieve another first-place win so they could earn another trophy and have an FBI agent speak with the class.

Contact Matthew Rhodes at mrhodes@brookingsregister.com.