Coding for Cybersecurity II

After taking the newly offered Coding for Cybersecurity class in the fall of their junior year, Ryan Hennessey ’17 and Zack Gardner ’17 “wanted more.” They met with Computer Science Department Chair Mr. Hansen to design a new course that would build on the Coding for Cybersecurity course. After the St. Albans Curriculum Committee approved the course concept that Ryan and Zack designed with Mr. Hansen, the new course Coding for Cybersecurity II (the other course was renamed to Coding for Cybersecurity I) was offered for the first time in the spring 2017 semester.

In this new course, Ryan and Zack created multiple mini-project proposals with the help of Mr. Hansen, and every few weeks they would give a project presentation to the Coding for Cybersecurity I class. In addition to the mini-projects, the course centered around four larger projects: an exploit of weak PNGs (pseudorandom number generators), a malware scanner, an online cybersecurity competition, and a “scraper-bot” that would try to mine personal information posted online.

With the creation of this new course that they helped design, Ryan and Zack were able to continue their education in the field of cybersecurity while at St. Albans, an opportunity that very few high school students have access to. In their last semester at St. Albans, Ryan and Zack improved their coding abilities, gain a wider of view of the impact that cybersecurity has on our lives, and learned how to collaborate on tasks effectively.

A detailed description of the Coding for Cybersecurity II course, written by Ryan and Zack, will be featured in this summer’s edition of the Bulletin.