Had a truly amazing opportunity yesterday to setup a workshop for Take Your Child to Work Day at my company.
With inspiration from Daniel Suarez's popular tech-heavy visionary book Daemon, the storyline we came up with set the stage for Cyber Security Investigators. We invited the children to enter a world where a prototype A.I. system had been built into a building. What's A.I.? "Artificial Intelligence--it's a computer system that appears to make rational decisions" and that came from a 12 year old! After asking how the building could "understand" what was going on within itself, the children's imagination would surprise you. Security cameras, audio sensors, motion detectors, badging systems, and signal receivers were all listed as the eyes and ears of the building.
After describing the A.I. system, we explained the building would attempt to detect suspicious activity and report this activity on a secret AR layer. The activity would be logged through tweets and visualized through an Augmented Reality app Layar for the iPhone. Each piece of suspicious activity was accompanied by an encrypted tweet that contained more information.
The children were then told the building had a security breach and some information was stolen--they were the investigators trying to uncover who stole the information and where they went. Sorting through the tweets, they identified the ones that seemed most suspicious and then attempted to use a decryption app Strambler to decrypt the message.
It was soon discovered that they needed the key phrase used to originally encrypt the message. After requesting the security imagery for that room, they were provided with a QR code. Scanning the QR code with the iPhone app ScanLife showed them the picture of an easily recognizable object. Many immediately said "Could this be the passcode?" After entering the words like "bear", "rose", and "yoshi" they were delighted to uncover the hidden message.
Based on these secret messages, they had to determine whether the reported action was legitimately suspicious and isolate any clues. A pair of decimal numbers in one message about "Exchanging downloaded files" prompted further questions: Was it a time? An exchange rate? "They're GPS coordinates!" exclaimed one of their older team members. "We need a map app" and it wasn't much longer before they were able to deduce that the thief must be traveling to the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Why? Because "They could be tracked if they sent the files over the internet"
It was truly amazing to watch the children learn to use the iPad and iPhone apps to do true detective like work. My assumption that 10 and 12 year olds were already familiar with iPads was not exactly accurate. One team who couldn't even figure out how to open an app at the beginning, quickly learned how to copy & paste text all using a series of touch gestures, navigating between apps and deducing their functionality without anything more than a hint here and there from us as facilitators. Would you believe they actually caught up to the other groups and actually won the race to discover the thief's exchange point?
One can not cease to be amazed in the ability of young children to grasp so quickly how to navigate this rather complicated process. And not just for the sake of repeating a learned task, but also in analyzing the data outcomes of a task and combining them to make the right decisions and arrive at a correct conclusion. The future will certainly be an exciting time as these young ones, not more than 15 years behind myself in age, will soon be joining the engineering workforce innovating and creating the technological world of tomorrow!
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