After taking part in the CyberFirst Girls competition and getting through to the semi-finals in 2021 we were delighted to be invited to the Development Day, hosted by QA at the University of Plymouth at the end of November. This event is designed to support female recruitment into cyber security and computing STE(A)M subjects in general. 

12 students, from year 8 and year 9, took part in this event, which saw a very early start to get to the venue in Plymouth for 9:30am. Despite this the students were eager to make use of all the experiences that the could as part of the day. The event was themed around a suspicious event taking place in the company that they were ‘employed’ by and the task set for small teams to discover who had leaked the new app they designed. As part of the investigation the students investigated elements of Digital Forensics and Cryptography as well as making use of investigating the digital footprint of those who leaked the app using elements of open-source intelligence systems. This event also saw students from others school and encouraged collaboration, as the teams were made up of mixed participants from the whole course, requiring a new set of communication tools.

“I found the whole day really interesting, as we had a set of laptops to really see how the teams could find the information out. The instructors were really interesting and helped us a lot, as their jobs were basically doing the same things for real. Meeting other people from different schools and having to work with someone you didn’t know was a new experience, but we became friends quickly and think we got the challenges right.” 

 - Year 9 student 

Look out for more opportunities to take part in these types of events, as well as more challenges within school like the Bebras Challenge recently run in the majority of Key Stage 3 Computing classes.