RAPID CITY, SD (July 20, 2017) – An all-girl computer coding summer camp at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology is free to accepted participants, thanks to a grant from the National Security Agency (NSA) GenCyber program. The NSA GenCyber program helps direct a diverse group of young people toward cybersecurity careers that are critical to national and economic security.
The SD Mines GenCyber camp takes place July 16-21, with 30 high school girls in grades 9-12. Core sessions at the camps will focus on cybersecurity, programming, networking and robotics. Students also have a choice of electives including: socket programming, password cracking, iRobot create, web hacking, 3-D printing, along with network forensics, and multimedia forensics. Multimedia forensics includes checking for digital tampering, to verify the authenticity of audio, videos, images, and to identify the originating source or device. Network forensics includes work to discover the source of security attacks or other problem incidents.
Media interested in interviewing camp organizers or participants can come to the closing ceremony at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, July 21 in room 204 of the Classroom Building on the SD Mines campus (campus map).
GenCyber Girls Camp director, Lisa Rebenitsch, Ph.D., is assistant professor of computer science at Mines. “It is great to have this opportunity to offer a camp like this in the Black Hills region. We see many talented women that come to our campus to major in computer science and computer engineering, but this gives us a chance to reach girls before they declare a major and show them all the wonderful things that can be done in the discipline,” says Rebenitsch.
Building a strong workforce of information technology and cybersecurity experts is not only crucial for the nation, these job skills have also been identified as one of the five industry sectors with the highest potential in South Dakota.
The SD Mines camp features a collaboration with Black Hills Information Security (BHIS), which is a company that is focused on customized security solutions for their clients. Officials from BHIS are involved in enhancing the curriculum alongside professors in Mines’ Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. The camp has also generated excitement from various companies that are interested in increasing recruitment of a diverse workforce. The SD Mines GenCyber Camp has received donations from Innovative Systems, Raven Industries, Black Hills Energy, SGT, NISC, Microsoft, Google, Echostar, L-3, and Garmin. These companies employ SD Mines graduates and are very excited about this project.
Those interested in more information on the camp can check the website.