At the beginning of the spring semester, Lexie Madlem, a senior in Angie Niebrugge's Intro to Programming course shared some information with Mrs. Niebrugge regarding the first ever Girls Go Cyber Security program/competition. This is a national event, but the state of Illinois was also promoting it in hopes of getting more females interested in computer science; specifically cyber security.
Before any girl could join, she had to start a cyber security "club" and have a teacher act as the advisor. Lexie wants to obtain a degree in cyber security and Mrs. Niebrugge knew this would be a great opportunity for her so she gladly agreed to be the advisor. Initially there were two students to join the club, but one backed out leaving Lexie to tackle the competition alone. So, the CHS club consisted of one lone student. Some larger schools in Illinois and across the country have such clubs already in place.
As Lexie tackled code after code, she kept advancing and over the past two days placed 77th out of 241 students in the national competition. There were only 45 girls from Illinois and just a handful of schools from Illinois made it to the nationals (Charleston High School is one of them). Here is a link from WCIA with more details about the competition. We are very proud of Miss Madlem's achievements and sincerely hope that this opportunity helps her continue to pursue her goals in this field in the future.