Sofia Sifuentes, an IB Academy at De Leon student at McAllen ISD’s De Leon Middle School, loves science. She earned a special award at the State Science and Engineering Fair, March 28-29, at Texas A&M University.
Thanks to an impressive project called Frequency Analysis: Cracking the Code Again!, she earned the Broadcom Foundation Coding with Commitment Award.
The award recognizes “STEM Knowledge with Coding in the project’s research, design, or development in a project that expresses Passion for helping or improving one’s community.” The special award came with a $250 prize.
She is a student in the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme based at De Leon. She worked with a mix of frequencies and algorithms to break encryption codes.
“I extended my work from last year where I used letter frequencies to crack encryption codes,” Sifuentes explained. “This year, I looked at two letter frequencies, known as bigrams. This turned out to be a much harder problem, since now my frequency data was two dimensional, so a simple ordering wouldn’t work. I created a novel algorithm that generated four-dimensional statistic vectors for each letter from the bigram frequency data."
She continued.
“I then compared this to four-dimensional statistic vectors generated from a key of data taken from Google’s corpus of scanned books. This led to decryption accuracies of around 80 percent for sufficiently long messages – an improvement from my algorithm last year of about 55 percent.”
Sifuentes also received the Thermo-Fisher Junior Innovators Challenge Award at the Regional State Science and Engineering Fair this spring.
About McAllen ISD
McAllen ISD is a three-time winner of the state’s highest rating, an “A,” and a four-time winner of the state’s Post-Secondary Readiness Distinction. In 2022, McAllen ISD was named the Best Large District in Texas through the H-E-B Excellence in Education awards. The district is home to 31 campuses and approximately 20,000 students. To learn more about McAllen ISD’s schools and programs, contact Student Outreach at 956-687-MISD (6473).