While teaching CS to middle school girls this summer, I came to the fabulous realization that girls at this age will learn anything as long as you turn it into a competitive game. This allows them to take the full power of their fabulous teen-girl attitudes and apply it to learning computer science. It sounds unlikely, but it is miraculously so.
When we were teaching the different areas of cryptography, we played a game where each team would send a representative up to the buzzer, the teachers would read a scenario, and the representatives would ring the buzzer and state whether this scenario was an example of symmetric key encryption, public key encryption, digital signatures, or multi-party computation and give the reason why. In a beautiful moment of attitude, our most z-snapping girl faked a slap at a teammate after a wrong answer, shouting, "Oh my god, that was so public key encryption!"
I hope that in four years this generation of girls will be entering the field of CS at top schools all over the country, kicking ass and taking names in cryptography while wearing oversized hoop earrings.
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