The CyberPatriot summer camp began Monday at the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center.
CyberPatriot is a national youth cyber education program, created by the Air Force Association (AFA) to encourage students toward cyber and STEM-related fields. Its five-day CyberCamp offers classes and activities to increase skills in cybersecurity, including systems administration that entails competencies in Windows, Linux and Ubuntu operating systems.
This year the Alliance for Cyber Education (ACE), a subcommittee of the CSRA Alliance for Fort Gordon, is funding and hosting three CyberCamps designed for middle and high school students interested in learning about cybersecurity.
Some 80 students from the Augusta Boys and Girls Club and from school districts throughout the CSRA are participating in the camps, the first of which launched Monday. This year’s camp is the first conducted in-person, rather than virtually, in two years, though the Alliance began hosting the camps in 2019.
“It took off like wildfire,” said Tom Clark, executive director of the CSRA Alliance for Fort Gordon, on why the Alliance is hosting three camps this summer, with the aim of putting roughly 70 kids in each camp. “We only had 16 middle and high school teams in 2019. This year, they fielded 122 teams across two states, in seven counties; so the interest is 100 times more.”
Students are guided through a series of courses and activities, to help them learn about basic cybersecurity principles and ethics, including computer learning games by Kahoot!, and CyberJeopardy.
The camp also features guest speakers in the afternoons to talk to the kids about different careers in the field, such as security software developers, security systems administrators or computer forensic analysists.
“They like to do the hands-on stuff,” said lead camp instructor Frank Estrada. “At the end of the day, we’re not going to teach them in a week how to be cybersecurity professionals, but at least we can teach them how to protect themselves. We give them that aspect of it too.”
Tuesday, campers learned about setting up virtual machines, or digital versions of physical computers. Sport Nelson, a rising ninth-grader who attended last year’s camp, described virtual machines as “the computer dreaming.”
The kids were instructed on “increasing the security, learning how to check your computer, and also learning how to troubleshoot,” said Calia Edmondson, a cyber camper on her way to 10th grade, who was already into coding and programming before starting at the camp.
“I’m very analytical, so it just helps to have a set of things to look at,” she said. “There’s so much to do in the cyber world. I’m just taking these classes, looking at internships and learning everything I can to see if cyber is my best career, or if it’s just a really good interest of mine.”
On Friday, the final day of the camp, the students will have a chance to test out all they’ve learned about protecting computers and networks from threats, when they join CyberPatriot teams and engage in the Cyber Defense Competition.
Clark notes that while the students have grown up in a digital age, there’s still a thrill in observing their increase in knowledge over the course of the camp.
“Most of them own a cell phone that could do all the things that I couldn’t do when I grew up,” he said. “But to see them go from having little knowledge to competing on the final day, [makes me] very proud of our staff.”
The CyberPatriot summer camp will continue at the Georgia Cyber Center through Friday, with the next camp scheduled for July.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
