Professorial Lecturer, adjunct faculty member in the Computer Science Department, Elyse Nicolas is the Principal Investigator/Program Director on a grant awarded to The George Washington University for a 2022 GenCyber camp program titled ‘The GenCyber GW Middle School Girls Cybersecurity Camp’, awarded by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The program is available free to middle school students from the Greater Washington DC area. During the virtual program, participants were each sent a box of equipment, snacks, and supplies needed for the summer camp, and a second box of supplies and snacks needed for the post-camp activity events. The program includes: a pre-camp outreach event which took place in June 2022, five days of summer camp which took place in Summer 2022, and three post-camp activity events in Fall 2022. The last post-camp event, Game Day was on December 3rd, which included another detailed schedule and collaboration at the end of the event with another GenCyber Camp program. During the program, participants remarked that they had fun while they were learning.
“I have really enjoyed leading this program, and I am very excited by the success of the 2022 program! Camper participants learned a lot about cybersecurity, STEM, cybersecurity career opportunities, and microbits. Additionally, many guests and guest speakers were also invited to participate during camp and post-camp. I think the 2022 program developed a sense of community with a fun, engaging, comfortable, inspiring, and creative learning environment! I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to speak about the growth in our 2022 program during a panel at the 2022 GenCyber Fall Meeting.” said Elyse Nicolas.