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    Cyberfirst Girls Competition

     

    Written by: By Amelia C and Anushka M, Year 8

    On the 18th November the 2024 National CyberFirst Girls competition took place. It is an annual competition and is organised by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of GCHQ. The aim is to raise more awareness of career opportunities in cyber security amongst girls. This is in the hope that they can increase the number of females in the cyber security workforce as the current number of roles held by women is only 17% globally.

    This term, Mrs Parker gave us the opportunity to take part in this exciting competition, which was open to all Year 8 girls. A group of girls were excited to take on the challenge and work together. It was a fantastic opportunity for us and showed us how interesting a job in cyber security would be. The competition consisted of 5 different sections: logic and coding, networking, cyber security, cryptography and the speciality. Each section was split into 3 different levels: beginner, intermediate and expert, with the expert challenges scoring the higher points. 

    We spent a lot of time working on skills that would help us during the competition by looking at short videos and other resources on the internet. We had the opportunity to try using different apps and programmes we had not previously used like Cyberchef and MD5. During the 10 day competition we worked really hard in small groups to complete as many of the challenges as possible with the aim to score the highest possible points. As a result, St Clement Danes came in 6th place in the East of England which is a great achievement. We were really grateful for this opportunity and pleased with the result.

    We all feel we have learnt a lot from the experience, not just from the challenges, but the collaboration of working as a team. Despite not winning, the competition has opened our minds to a future career in this industry. We would like to thank Mrs Parker for giving us the opportunity, it has shown that Computing has a lot more to it. It was a privilege to represent St Clement Danes School. 

     

     

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