PHS has held the Montgomery County Public Schools High School Forensics competition for the past 7 years. Each year, 200 students from throughout the county come to Montgomery Community College to try to solve a murder mystery. The students compete in diverse groups of 3 to try to navigate their way through a digital maze of evidence that almost could be mistake-able for real world evidence. The organizers of this competition are high schoolers who operate independently under the guidance of Mark Estep, Computer Science Teacher in SMCS, and Chris Thompson, 2014 PHS alumni who works professionally in cyber security.

 xCTF is the platform that makes this possible. The competitions from the past are kept online and freely available so that students get to take home and share the things they managed to find with their friends. The students get to build and run their own competition with ease with the platform. You can check out the amazing work being done by current SMCS students here: https://mcpshsf.com/