Earlier this term I persuaded a quartet of Year 8 girls to take part in this year’s CyberFirst competition. This competition is run by the National Cyber Security Centre and is designed to inspire girls in Year 8 to consider a career in cybersecurity. For a week in January, the girls spent most of their break times working together to solve a series of increasingly challenging puzzles in which they had to decipher coded messages. By the time we entered the competition, it had already been running for a week so we were very pleasantly surprised to find we had qualified for the semi-finals.
On Saturday the 8th February I accompanied the four girls travelled to Her Majesty’s Government Communication Centre at Hanslope Park near Milton Keynes – a very intimidating venue, surrounded in barbed wire. Once we negotiated the various security gates we found ourselves in the competition room along with four other teams. After an introduction to the role of the NCSC and HMGCC the competition began. The girls had three hours to solve as many of the challenges they could and I was not allowed to give them any assistance at all. After a nervous beginning, partially due to the nature of the venue and the fact that we didn’t know what to expect, the girls soon started to solve some of the easier challenges. A regularly updated leaderboard showed the ranking of the 22 teams in our region and for the first hour, we hovered around the 18th mark. But as lunch break neared they edged further up and by the break sat in 12th position.
As they had lunch the girls were worried that they had solved all the challenges they were going to be able to but the break obviously helped as when they returned they soon started gaining more points and at one point reached 6th on the leaderboard. By the final hour of the competiti0n, all the teams had reached the very challenging puzzles and so there were very few solutions found. Even though the challenges were incredibly hard (even the HMGCC staff found them difficult) the girls kept working and kept supporting each other, showing great determination, resilience and character. With about 20 minutes to go one of the other teams cracked a puzzle which jumped them up the leaderboard and as a result, we finished the day 8th out of 22 teams in our region.
This was an incredible achievement considering it was not a competition any of the girls would have chosen to do and we were by far the smallest school in the semi-final. STaff from the other competing schools could not believe I only had a cohort of 11 girls to select a team for and the team that won our semi-final had entered 18 teams of four girls in the qualifying round and so was able to pick their strongest four girls for the semi-final.
I was so proud of how the girls conducted themselves during the day. Their determination and teamwork was inspiring to watch and they should also be very proud of their accomplishments.
Well done girls and thank you
Chris Leach 