Girls' CyberFirst Team Prepare for the National Final

As the KES Year 8 CyberFirst Girls Competition team ready themselves for the National Final this weekend, we spoke to the team to find out what it's been like to take part in the competition organised by the National Cyber Security Centre.  Ahead is the National Final, with ten teams seeking to crack the various competition challenges. 

The content for each category of the competition is consistent with subjects within the Computer Science syllabus from both the National Curriculum and Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence. However, the competition does contain some advanced cyber topics that are not covered in traditional education but will seek to stretch the lateral thinking and additional cyber knowledge of the teams.

We wish our team the very best of luck!

"The CyberFirst Girls Competition has been really awesome! We’ve enjoyed solving the challenges and working together as a team. We started the competition not knowing much about any of the topics, though they were always ones we’d been interested in. We’d only done pretty basic things, like using Scratch and Caesar ciphers, but throughout the competition we learnt a lot more. We really enjoyed the online round and found tools like CyberChef really useful. In our spare time we were constantly trying to complete more challenges - if we got stuck, we’d ask the rest of the team and research on the Internet. 

"The semi-finals were really exciting. We each started with the section we had mainly worked on in the qualifier, but we were all helping each other too. Often, working as a team, we figured it out but at some points we were consulting the cyber sponge, our team mascot, for help.  There was a live online scoreboard for the region so we could see how everyone was doing.  The first time we looked up at the scoreboard we were in fifth place. We were really excited and worked even harder on the challenges. After a bit, we moved up the scoreboard, and we were in first place! We were told our teachers were screaming in the other room. Before lunch we dropped down the scoreboard a bit but managed to get back up to first place for the last half hour. We weren’t sure we were going to make it but then it was the last thirty seconds and we were still first. We couldn’t believe it! We’re so excited for the final; it’s going to be an amazing experience. The CyberFirst Girls Competition is amazing and we definitely recommend it to anyone, whether they’ve done anything on the topics before or not."

Hannah Blacker, KES CyberFirst Team Member