A team of cyber security experts remotely educated 12,000 pupils in one week of lockdown

The team at the Academy of Cyber Security ran live, online YouTube lessons covering cyber security & computer science for school pupils across the UK

?A 1-week rapid response initiative, Cyber School was created to educate school pupils on the topics of cyber security & computer science. We spoke with Jonathan Slater, Founder of Cyber School and the Academy of Cyber Security;

“I had a lightbulb moment whilst watching the news about school closures, and we decided to use our team’s expertise to help these pupils. We wanted to help parents too, both with home schooling and by keeping the children occupied whilst parents juggled home working responsibilities.”

Cyber School ran 3 live lessons a day on YouTube Live during the week commencing 30th April, with over 12,000 school pupils tuning in.

“Not only did we put together the live lessons, but each lesson had carefully planned ‘Cyber Projects’ which encouraged the pupils to engage in some self-directed learning.

“The most popular lesson was ‘Raiding The Chocolate Factory and Stealing the Secret Recipe’ which was actually a great introduction to open source intelligence for ages 6+. Hannah Simes, a former Intelligence Analyst, put the lesson together.

We undertook reconnaissance on the Chocolate Factory website  and then had to snoop on the Oompa Loompa’s Facebook profiles to find the password to the secret Oompa Loompa portal. This is where the secret chocolate cookie recipe was held! We had to use Caesar’s Cipher to decrypt the password before we could get in.

It was an amazing lesson and so many families actually baked the cookies in the secret recipe they raided!”

 “We had hundreds of children cracking secret codes and getting hands on with cryptography after watching lessons with James Bore. We also had hundreds of parents join their children during Tom Sinclair’s advanced classes on ethical hacking”

“Fingers crossed this week-long introduction to cyber security has inspired a generation of children to follow a career path into the field”

Catch up with all lessons here