Communications of the ACM
High School Girls Learn 'virtuous Hacking' in Computer Science Program
CS4CS program participants are encouraged to serve as "computer science and cyber security ambassadors" to woo classmates to cyber security awareness events and competitions.
Credit: NYU Tandon
Forty-five high school girls are tackling programming, virtuous hacking, and digital forensics this week at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. The no-cost program is intended to woo more women into data security. Tandon's population of female students for the coming academic year is 40 percent, compared to a national U.S. average of 20 percent among engineering undergraduate programs in 2015, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.
The program, Computer Science for Cyber Security, lasts three weeks and will culminate with a cyber-mystery that involves, aptly, the theft of Wonder Woman's iconic lasso.
The students meet daily, Monday through Friday. During the first part of the camp, they receive lessons in programming, depending on their level of expertise. Then they receive an introduction to cryptography, by examining the classic cyphers, frequency analysis, hashing, and related topics. From there, it's onto operating systems, steganography (the study of message concealment), and image analysis, networks, the web, databases and forensics.
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