Girls Go Draws Many Academy Cyber Security Enthusiasts

#SacredHeartsAcademy Cyber Lancers

When the command came to “go” at 4 a.m. on February 20, the Academy’s aspiring computer “techies” were “off and running” in the inaugural #GirlsGoCyberStart challenge!

The 15 teams of Lancers in grades nine to 12 joined over 5,700 other students from across the nation on this week-long cyber “quest.” Their goal was to tackle fun and interactive online challenges as “cyber protection agents” tasked with protecting an important operation base.

In the process, participants explored the exciting worlds of code-cracking, cyber security tools, security flaw detection, digital forensics and more. While all of the Academy’s cyber protection agents displayed superb security skills, two teams – the CyberBeans and Yikes the CyberGhosts – scored in the top 100 in the nation out of 2,355 teams and were sixth and seventh among Hawai’i competitors.

To assist the Lancer effort, Deborah Kula hosted a week-long “Cyberthon” in her classroom after school hours. She set a theme for each day and provided added motivation in keeping with this theme, including “cyber-ghetti sauce with password pasta” on “Exploits Wednesday” and “malware marshmallows” and “vanilla virus ice cream” on “Spyware Friday.”

#SacredHeartsAcademy Cyber Lancers

Kula remarked, “Many participants in this program came from the Cyberpatriot teams, but many had no prior experience. This is a testament to all of our students being encouraged to take risks!"

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Academy CyberPatriots Rank Platinum, Gold & Silver

Way to go Sacred Hearts Academy CyberPatriot teams: Team404, CyberLancers, CyberBeans and CyberLambs!

Round 2 scores are in! Team404 and the CyberLancers placed in the Platinum Tier, CyberBeans were the top ranking Hawaii team in the Gold Tier (barely missing a platinum designation), and the CyberLambs were the top ranking Hawaii team in the Silver Tier!

All 4 teams will compete in the State Round over the Jan. 13-15 weekend. The top 3 teams in each tier within the state advance to the Regional Round. Best of luck ladies! Congratulations! 

#GoLancers #SacredHeartsAcademy #CyberPatriots #SHALancersLately #SHAKaLeo

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Coding Marathon with UH Association for Computing Machinery

Friday night, April 1, was no night for fools!  Eight Academy students from the Intro to Computer Science class and the CyberPatriot teams gathered at the POST (Pacific Ocean Science and Technology) building to join students from the UH ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) in their outreach activity:  a Coding Marathon.

Thank you to the UH ACM student members who served as mentors for the event:  Evelyn Pirnia, Tor Nielsen, Clay Nakamura, Kalani Sanidad, and John Moroney (not in the photo).  Academy participants were sophomores Ashley Acoba, Catlynn Nguyen, Julia Oehlers, juniors Christina Chen, Leeona Domingo, Carlee Matsunaga, Taryn Wong, and senior Weiyi Huang joined Mrs. Kula for hours of "command line" instruction, the basics of Git usage, and Java programming and compiling on Cloud9, and lots of inspiration from UH students who are passionate about the work they are doing.

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