A group of incoming Davidson High School freshmen is spending part of the summer indoors, learning what a career in computing could look like. The University of South Alabama is hosting its annual computing camp for students who just finished middle school and will enter Davidson in the fall.
The camp, which began at Davidson in 2015, kicked off its week-long run Tuesday and gives teenagers a chance to test whether the field suits them before they ever set foot in a high school computer class.
Organizers point to cybersecurity as one of the region’s most in-demand fields, with far more job openings than qualified applicants. Camp lessons cover programming languages and core computer skills, along with an unusual twist on ethics: students learn to think like malicious hackers so they can understand how attacks work.
“How they do things, how they program, in order to kind of teach them how to build defensive software and networks to defend against those kinds of attacks,” said Dr. Todd McDonald, director of USA’s Center for Forensic Information Technology and Security. “It’s kind of like, with great power comes great responsibility.”
The Davidson camp is free to participants through sponsorship by AMS Calvert. USA also runs other computing camps for teens across the summer, though those carry a registration cost.