Girl Scout Cybersecurity Badge Workshop

On Saturday, September 24th 2022, the TU Women in Cybersecurity and iTU organizations at the University of Tulsa hosted their first Girl Scout Cybersecurity Badge workshop of the 2022-23 school year. I had the privilege of being one of the event organizers and can't wait to help plan the future workshops this year and for the years to come.

I would like to say the workshop went perfectly as planned without any complications along the way, but I would be lying. Up till the morning of the event there was not a set plan in place. Originally there were supposed to be two workshops on the 24th, a morning and afternoon session. The morning session was for Daisies & Brownies and the afternoon was for Juniors. However, due to a low number of signs up for the event it was combined into one afternoon session. The day before the event, Friday the 23rd, I found out that the Daisies/Brownies have different requirements than the Juniors to receive their Cybersecurity badge....and we had not planned for that. So, one day of panicked planning and a late night teams call with a former TU student (she helped start the workshops a few years ago) later, we had (kind of) a plan!

Since there were only 20 girls signed up for the event we were able to split them up based on level (Daisy/Brownie & Junior) and hosted 2 workshops in 1. After gathering last minute supplies on Friday night & Saturday morning, and setting up rooms for the event, we were ready to welcome our volunteers and provide them instructions on leading the different sessions for the day. Thankfully, I have some wonderful friends who were able to volunteer and made the whole process 100 times smoother.

Once the Girl Scouts began to arrive, the day started to fly by. I led 3 of the 10 sessions for the day, and I hope the girls learned something new (I know I did). When teaching the girls about malware, specifically viruses, worms, and Trojans, one of them asked the question "Why do they all have such weird names?". It's been a while since I worked with children and I forgot the types of questions they ask, so I was stumped on this one. Luckily, another volunteer was able to quickly step in and provide a fun answer to the question.

Overall, helping plan and lead sessions for the workshop was a fun opportunity and I learned quite a bit. We were able to figure out which areas of the workshop need improvement and plan to implement some changes to make the future workshops even better! Events like these are important to me because I didn't have opportunities to learn about technology or cybersecurity growing up, so I want to help introduce K-12 students to the world of tech and its opportunities. I hope to let K-12 students, especially girls, know that anyone can be involved in tech and that it's never too late to start learning.

Our next Girl Scout Cybersecurity Badge Workshop is next month and I can't wait to see how it goes! :)