For Justice Suh, it began with RuneScape, a medieval-themed online fantasy role-playing game. Tired of spending hours clicking a mouse to make his avatar chop wood, the eight-year-old boy wrote a program to simulate clicks, freeing him up to play other video games.

Now 17 years old, Mr. Suh is turning his hacking skills to a real world scenario: North Korea and its information buffer.

Last month, at an event dubbed "Hack North Korea," Mr. Suh and his younger sister Madison, also 17, presented an idea to circumvent the country's tight information controls with small satellite receivers that can pick up South Korean broadcasts.

The idea took first place at the event, held by the Human Rights Foundation, a New York non-profit, in the San Francisco Bay area. That won the siblings and Matthew Lee, a 31-year-old app developer from San Francisco who worked with them on the idea, a week in Seoul to talk about how to push the project forward.

It won't be easy. During a series of meetings with North Korea human rights groups, Mr. Lee and the two teenagers, who are also busy applying for college, are getting a crash course about the challenges of breaching the North's information barrier.