FIRST BYTES TEAM PROJECT

Many thanks to Mathworks, Inc. for their generous donation of Matlab
Software to our 2003 First Bytes participants.

With the outstanding leadership of faculty members, Mary Eberlein and Mike Scott, First Byte participants spent the week working on a team-based cryptography project using Matlab software. This project required the participants to apply many of the ideas and themes they were hearing about all week.

The girls learned about the Caesar, Substitution and Vigerere’s ciphers by developing code to decrypt messages. As a result, the girls received hands-on experience programming, created and analyzed simple algorithms, discovered the importance of understanding hardware basics, and were able to experience the satisfaction of seeing the computer do what they “asked” it to do.

Campers worked on the following Labs:

• Caesar Cipher
• Substitution Cipher
• Vigenere Cipher