By Cailean McLeod
Whatcom Community College will be hosting the annual GenCyber day camp on July 25 through 30 and August 1 through 6.
The cybersecurity day camp, instructed by Whatcom teachers Travis McEwen and Christy Saunders, will be for high school and middle school students from around the county.
“Basically they learn the fundamentals of cybersecurity,” said Corrinne Sande, Principal Investigator for Cyberwatch West and Whatcom staff member since 1999.
McEwen, security and networking instructor for 3 years, said students will learn ten principles for internet security that they can use both professionally and casually, including data hiding, minimization of software, and layering of online defenses.
“All of them focus on security, without these, it is difficult to consider yourself secure,” said McEwen.
“The middle school camps will have a lot of activities,” said Saunders, noting that they will be working with various programming languages such as Python and Scratch.
“Some of the activates with the high schoolers will be the exact same in scope to the middle schoolers but geared towards a higher level,” said McEwen, “it is not going to be a lecture class, we are going to have students interacting and working on labs.”
Saunders said that with the grant from the National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation that her group received last march, they will be able to make GenCyber free this year.
Saunders also said that there is a form that participants can fill out for class entry, and although sign-ups have not concluded yet, once the number of submissions reaches maximum capacity they will have to start taking applications for class entry.
