Harford’s Fourth GenCyber Camp for Middle School Students will promote Cybersecurity as a Future Career Choice

The National Security Agency (NSA) and National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded a grant to Harford Community College to fund the College’s “GenCyber Smart Girls Camp,” a one-week, non-residential cybersecurity summer day camp. The grant will enable Harford to offer two one-week sessions in summer 2023 to 40 rising 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th graders at no cost. The main goal of the camp is to increase girls’ interest in cybersecurity and cyber engineering and connect them with positive female role models. The GenCyber Smart Girls Camp will help inspire the next generation of cyber stars, helping them to shift from being users to becoming makers, coders, developers, and programmers.

In support of the GenCyber program goal of providing year-round engagement in cyber content and exposure to career opportunities, Harford will offer several outreach events over the next two years and a camp in the summer of 2023. Each day during camp, students will participate in individual and small group hands-on projects to investigate, program, and hack familiar Internet of Things (IOT) devices such as fitness trackers, Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, and virtual assistants (e.g. Amazon Echo), and explore their relationship to “the cloud.” Participants will explore the technological and design principles that drive familiar devices through accessible activities framed around exploring Smart Life, Smart Home, and Smart Play domains, and by interacting with women who are cybersecurity engineers.

The College plans to recruit students who are new to cybersecurity to support the broader aim of attracting students from underserved populations to create a more diverse program.

Harford hosted its first GenCyber camp in summer 2019, successfully teaching 40 students from various middle schools from across Harford County. In 2021 and 2022, Harford hosted its second and third camp, hosting 40 additional students in each.

For more information, email Dawn Grissom at dgrissom@harford.edu.