Ms Davies (Digital Design Creator)

This year there has been a huge interest in the CyberFirst Girls Competition at BGS. The competition, run by the National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ aims to provide a fun but challenging environment to encourage and inspire the next generation of young women to consider computer science as an option with a view to a future career in cyber security.

The week-long competition which began on Monday 21^st January (ending Monday 28^th January) has seen a record number of entries this year. A total of 54 Year 8 students split into 14 teams have been challenging themselves across four different disciplines: logic and coding, networking, cryptography and cyber security. Each question is derived from skills used every day by cyber security professionals and all can be answered using techniques freely available on the internet.

The girls will need to work, discuss and research together to solve as many challenges as they can, while having fun. The girls are already doing really well at working independently and figuring out unfamiliar concepts such as TCP and BASE64 encryption. The results will be announced next week in the EDIT.

Find out more about the competition here.