Scytl’s Cryptography Researcher, Núria Costa, will participate for the second time in the “Una Enginyera a Cada Escola” (An Engineer at Every School) initiative, organized by the Association of Women Researchers and Technologists (AMIT, Asociación de Mujeres Investigadoras y Tecnólogas). The project began this past academic year and is led by Paz Morillo, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and head of gender equality at the university’s Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB). The initiative is focused on children ages 8 through 12 and aims to enhance the visibility of women technologists and to change the perception that technological studies are only for men, and not women.
Each engineer involved in the project – there are 33 women participating this year – is assigned to a school where she gives a one-hour workshop explaining what an engineer does, talks about her experience being a woman engineer, discusses what the children want to be when they grow up, and conducts an activity related to her career. Núria Costa will be going to the Public School of Sagrada Familia, when the situation allows, to introduce fourth and sixth-grade children to cryptography, helping them to decrypt secret messages using techniques like the Scytale, or the Caesar and Vigenère ciphers.
