Cyberfirst Award Ceremony at Oxford University

Last year, I participated in the Cyberfirst Girls Competition, a UK-wide event organized by the National Cyber Security Centre to inspire girls to explore the field of cybersecurity and computer science. After winning, my team had the wonderful opportunity to go to Oxford University yesterday and enjoy the Award Ceremony and Enrichment Day! Here is a short insight on this journey...

The competition

Me and my team of three other friends  had to solve a variety of challenges over a 10 day span in the following categories: logic and coding, networking, cybersecurity and 'special topics'. They were "find the flag" based challenges with each challenges earning us different numbers of points based on difficulty. Before the competition had started, I had gathered some resources for our team to prepare for the challenge before-hand but I must say the competition experience was nothing like we had expected.

I wouldn't say that it was our prior-knowledge on cybersecurity that helped us succeed in this competition but rather the ability to absorb new information on the fly, mastering the concepts as we went along the challenges. The whole week was really fun, as we pretty much dedicated all our time to the competition. The challenges page was up and running 24/7 for the 10 days, so really the more time we spent on it, the more we would get done, so these 10 days had us waking up early and working on the problems until late at night, in crazily long calls - and spending each lunchtime and breaktime in our school computing room. Honestly, yes it was intense, but I cannot express how fun the whole experience was, the thrill of solving a hard problem that we had been working on for ages, or suddenly cracking the solution. Apart from the coding, the experiences bonded us four friends so closely, us sharing the same eagerness and dedication that kept us going.

Enrichment Day at Oxford University

The day started at arriving at Oxford University with a quick tour. Then we soon were taken to view the Oxford Robotics Institute where we were told about the different things that happened there and different groups such as the Dynamic Robot Systems group, Cognitive Robotics Group, Applied Artificial Intelligence Lab and Team Orion to name a few. Then we got to explore motion-detection hands on with a small self conducted experiment. After which we shook hands with the hand of a '3D Printed Soft Hand' as we learned about 'computational morphology'. I must say this was one of the most interesting hand-shakes I have ever done :) Then we got to meet SPOT! The robotic dog, which showed us a few tricks it could do, followed by a brief on how technologies such as SPOT can help those in emergency situations such as areas of debris or rubble. I had seen SPOT before on video, but I never thought I would get to see it in person.

After that we went to another part of the University where my team and other teams at the award ceremony had the opportunity to code drones to complete a set of challenges such as doing backflips and flying in unique shapes and directions. We also took part in a workshop based on Oxford's 'Oxplore' department which focused on delving into big questions such as "Would it be better if we all spoke the same language?" and "Would you want to live forever ". After all the enrichment experiences, we had a quick lecture and then took the coach to our hotel to get ready for the big evening!

Award Ceremony

After a day of exploring Oxford University we all got ready to attend the Award Ceremony. There we had a gala dinner alongside talks from people in the cybersecurity sector such as Felicity Oswald, interim CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre and more. Winning teams of each category received their awards along with gifts such as  a laptop and desk setup! After, me and my friends explored the enchanting hallways of Oxford University itself.