Houghton High School students Crystal Wang and Nelson Monte, for the team named “Angles,” captured Fourth Place in the 2021 Governor’s High School Cyber Challenge (GHSCC), a state of Michigan-level cybersecurity competition for high school students. College of Computing faculty members Yu Cai and Ruihong Zhang are the team’s coaches.
The GHSCC aims to expose K-12 students to cybersecurity at no cost to the students or schools. Students participate in various challenges that test their knowledge of cybersecurity, computer science, and information technology through two rounds of competitions. This year the competition included more than 600 student participants across the state of Michigan.
“We were all impressed by their mastery of knowledge and how self-motivated they were, especially considering that this is their first cyber competition.” said Yu Cai of Crystal and Nelson’s performance in the competition.
Yu Cai and Ruihong Zhang have been working with local school districts on several cybersecurity outreach activities and competitions. They have organized a high school team and a middle school team to compete in the upcoming national CyberPatriot competition. GenCyber, another outreach activity, provides summer cybersecurity camp experiences for K-12 students and teachers. Learn more about the GenCyber program at mtu.edu/gencyber.