Total number of attendees: 80 + | Languages: LU, EN, FR

Hack4Kids developed its first workshops for early childhood

“This event was a great opportunity for children and parents to discover cyber security through playful activities. For some children, it was the first time they saw their parents’ work place and they clearly enjoyed having fun there together.” Laurent de la Vaissière, Director in Deloitte’s Cyber Risk Services team

SECURITYMADEIN.LU, in cooperation with Deloitte, organized, in the frame of their Corporate Social Responsibility initiative, a Hack4Kids event on Saturday 28th January 2017. This Hack4Kids gathered around 100 of Deloitte employees' children aged from 4 to more than 14 years old. For the first time, Hack4Kids adapted some basic workshops to the early childhood level. On the whole, many different playful activities were organized for each age category including parents. Members from the Code Club Luxembourg, IT students from the University of Metz and information security experts from Deloitte and SECURITYMADEIN.LU presented the different workshops. Professionals from the Deloitte Cyber Risk team were also involved in the event as they hosted workshops for adults on cyber security awareness and best practices as well as Q&A sessions.

Highlights from the program:

• A pixel art workshop: the history of video games is a great way to understand the way a picture is displayed on a computer screen. Children got the opportunity to draw their own pictures with post-it.

• "Network game" workshops: this playful and dynamic game was given to the early childhood as well as older children and helped them understand how the TCP/IP protocol works and got introduced with basis in network engineering.

• Coding workshops: this activity was given in an unplugged way to the early childhood: the children aged from 4 to 6 years old had to program each other and had to behave like real robots. Children aged from 7 to 13 years old were introduced to open source Scratch software and took part in a creative exercise.

• An introduction to security and cryptography: secret passages lost in a castle, backdoors in electronic messaging services, 3D keys used to open TSA lockers from luggage… Many examples which made children think about the illusion of security's notion.

• A light-painting workshop: a funny photography shooting technique which taught children how to paint with LED in the dark to realize creative pictures.

• A drone workshop: children learned how to handle drones with a dedicated programming language.

• Personal data and risk assessment: children were informed about Big Data risks through several interactive presentation.

• A mini hackathon: this workshop targeted teenagers and their goal was to secure a room with sensors and robots.