College computer-science programs seem to be using every trick in the book to woo students: When they’re not turning their labs into arcades or getting a promotional boost from popular video-game characters, they’re thinking up new contests tailor-made for high-school computer whizzes.
Iowa State University, for example, just held the first-ever High School Cyber Defense Competition, an event that asked teams to design computer networks that could hold hackers and other bad actors at bay. To test the networks’ stability, a group of graduate students from the university took on the role of the hackers, creating security holes that the high-schoolers were then asked to fix. (Iowa State Daily)
