Enjoying the challenge at St Augustine’s

Students at St Augustine’s Catholic College, Trowbridge, have been challenging themselves on a number of fronts over the past few months, with activities including the Duke of Edinburgh Practice and Assessed Expedition, the CyberFirst Girls Competition and Cyber Centurions.

Duke of Edinburgh Expedition

During May, 24 students started out on their Duke of Edinburgh adventure. The students attended the training weekend on May 9th-11th at Thoulstone Park in Westbury. We were very lucky to pretty much have the site to ourselves and we were blessed with perfect weather over the three days.

During their training, each day started and ended with parents dropping off and picking up due to the no camping rule still being in place. Students separated in to their four teams and focused on learning all the key skills that they needed for the expedition. This included, first aid, camp craft, putting up tents, navigation and route planning. On one of the days they even went off to test how well their navigation skills were going. I am pleased to say that they were all successful in their practice expedition and this actually enabled them to complete their Bronze expedition section.

Two weeks later, after the students had fully recovered they were once again dropped off at the Small Grain Picnic Site in Devizes. They each had their rucksacks packed, snacks at the ready and 2L of water. Their spirits were high despite the weather looking a bit poor! They successfully completed navigation around the area and completed their aims along the way.

Parents played a huge role in enabling the students to be able to camp as they transported them from Devizes to Thoulstone Park each day – but it made the experience so much better for the students. Setting up tents, cooking, playing games, chatting – it all made the experience better for them.

Despite some cold and even a soaking wet night, the spirits remained high. After three days of walking, camping, navigating and completing aims we ended up with 21 students fully completing the award. They showed great resilience, organisation, team/problem solving skills and successfully completed their Silver Expedition. Sadly, we did have to put an end to three students Silver Expedition due to injuries – two of which happened during activities before the expedition. We hope to offer these students the opportunity to complete their expedition in the future.

Some of the Duke of Edinburgh students on their recent expedition

CyberFirst Girls Competition

During late January and early February, four teams of girls (16 in total) took part in an amazing, annual cyber competition. The girls had heard about our previous successes in past cyber competitions (CyberFirst and CyberCenturions) and were keen to get involved and see how they fared against this year’s challenges.

Each team came up with a name, Team Teach 2021, Cyber Squids, Cyber Spies and Define Cyber. After logging in, the teams competed virtually in a 10-day competition where they solved a multitude of cyber problems relating to four different categories – logic and coding, networking, cryptography and cyber security.

The aim of the competition is to encourage more girls to think about computer science and in particular cyber careers in the future. There were so many moments where team work and perseverance really made a difference. The competition is supported by NCSC and GCHQ.

Each team worked incredibly hard, communicating through phones as well as Teams, holding meetings with teachers to get further support and spending hours searching the internet for vital clues to help them score points.

This year was so different, due to Covid, we were not in our usual classroom space and therefore the students did not experience the buzz. But we (the department) are especially proud of our upcoming cyberists as they truly put in a lot of time and effort (whist completing school work as well) in order to achieve the best scores that they could in the competition. Several of them will be teaming up with some of the boys in an upcoming Immersive Labs competition in the coming weeks.

Cyber Centurions

During November, December and January, seven teams took part in a three-part Cyber Centurion competition which is all about network, defence and cyber security.

In Year 9 we had a mixed team as well as a team of girls take part – this competition is particularly tricky and due to not being in the same room as the older members with more experience, getting used to the competition did take a while. However, they persevered, worked as a team and used the resources that they had available.

In addition, we also had two teams of Year 10s, one all-boys team who made it to the final as CyberCenturion Juniors last year, as well as an all-girls team made up of computer scientists who were interested in finding out more about the competition. Again, these teams did extremely well and were so close to getting in to the finals. There was a lot of team work and even support from the boys throughout.

Further to these teams, we were lucky to have our Little Miss Virtuals girls team (CyberFirst finalists and CyberCenturions Junior Finalists) taking part as one of the Year 11 teams as well as the very competitive computer science boys team who have also competed in CyberCenturion for the last three years. The students worked especially hard and this room was extremely competitive. We even celebrated two birthdays within Year 11 and hopefully made lots of memories before they leave.

Lastly, we had a boys team from Year 12. This team had to work remotely in the Sixth Form block and even at home during the competition days. This proved challenging and also meant that they could not access the whole competition on time due to technical issues. They have been competing for three years as well and have remained dedicated throughout. The boys were extremely engaged and enjoyed the challenges that this competition had to offer.

Overall, this competition is always a fun and engaging challenge for our students every year. All the students love the experience and we hope that it gives them an insight in to possible futures in cyber.