PCES student learns about coding, malware with cyber camp scholarship
From a Thursday evening to a Monday evening, when he, along with his group of 27 other children, graduated, he learned more about a subject that already interested him. It was an experience he described as “fun and interesting but also challenging.”
“He was already looking at being an engineer,” Fisher’s mom, Tina Fisher, explained, adding that, despite his age, “he’s got big dreams anyway.”
She said the family had been to the Space and Rocket Center before, but this represented her son’s first opportunity to attend a camp like this. “He loved it,” she added. “His teacher, Nina Jackson, showed me a flyer about the scholarship for the camp, and we applied for it.”
Fisher said what he liked about coding was that “it was kind of a different way to look at things.” Although he enjoyed finding out all about it, he said it was also challenging because of “how long it could be and how long it could get.”
He compared coding to languages.
“We read things in English or whatever language you speak, and the computer reads things in ones and zeroes in coding languages,” Fisher continued. “Say I wanted a computer to open a file, I would have to use a coding language, or ones and zeroes, to tell it what to do.”
In addition to coding, they also learned about malware.
“In the evenings, we learned about malware, which is malicious cyber threats, and in the mornings, we learned all about coding and different ways to code and decode things,” Fisher explained, “and I think it was the first day we learned about ones and zeroes (binary coding) and how to decode all that. I would love to learn more about it and maybe implement it into my future.”