Cyber First EmPower Event
As part of our wider commitment to raising the profile of cyber in school, 23 Year 8 students had the opportunity to attend the Cyber First EmPower event on Friday 17th November 2023.
This is an annual event hosted by CyberFirst with over 1000 Year 8 girls attending from schools across Gloucestershire; with 25 supporting industries and universities running interactive cyber workshop activities. The key aims of the event are to: educate and inspire the students about cyber security as a whole, demonstrate to them the type of companies working within the sector, introduce them to a range of different people working in the space, and hopefully inspire them to consider careers within the industry.
The students had an opportunity to take part in a Capture the Flag activity where they had to decipher codes to find passwords, complete a lockbox treasure trail which consisted of a series of small padlocked boxes which all contain different puzzles. Solving the puzzle in one box allowed them to open the next box. They programmed spheros to run through a maze using block programming and then Hack the VAR, a game where the objective is to hack VAR in a penalty shootout in order to win using Python coding…..Mrs Hayward got involved with this one as a brilliant goal keeper!
The girls were exceptional in their enthusiasm, ability and behaviour being described as a credit to the school. They, alongside all the girls in Year 8, will now take part in the CyberFirst Girls' Competition 2023 which starts on Monday 20th November. They have 10 days to crack codes and puzzles in order to score high enough to go through to the next round. Please wish them luck and support them in their quest.
