CryptKids Keynote

okay so for those who didn't read it so I just so you know how impressive this is she recently completed her third summer working as an embedded software engineer for a defense contractor okay and she's a high school junior all right I know some adults who can't get jobs like that no offense guys but as student voice counsel that uses statistical analysis of County data and grassroots organization to change discriminatory practices against underrepresented student populations okay I've worked it with her besides charm she runs the volunteers there and she also runs blue team village volunteers at DEFCON and does an amazing job doing both and she's run my escape rooms for me for the last couple years but she's

kind of like does and a half time for me this year but she did graciously agreed to keynote before she had other things she had to attend to so with no further ado please welcome Miss Samantha Mosley [Applause] all right well hello everyone thanks Jenny for that wonderful introduction so my name is Samantha Mosley um right now I'm a little sick so sorry about the voice so you can find me on twitter at prodigy just a shout out to buddy from bacon con he gave me that handle a few years ago so some of my experience i'm at a time graduate of girls who code I did FIRST LEGO League for a few years and we went to the International

invitationals I've been an intern at various places I was once a website developer and right now I'm focusing on creating a legacy at my high school with the student voice Council

so who's ready for kids Con so is this anybody's first ever b-sides yeah well this was also my first b-sides a few years ago so um in 2016 I came here for the very first time um this pictures from 2017 but you know it's very close so I understand that it was very overwhelming and I got to meet tons of new people while I was here and I discovered a love for volunteering and working with different people who have different opportunities and experiences than I do and none of that would have happened without besides kids so that very first shift that very first year I was assigned to snap circuits so back then I had no idea what snap circuits were or

what they did so basically it's a way to learn how circuits work together how like how electricity can flow through wires and things so throughout the day I had to talk to different people and actually learn how these works so that I could help other people learn how they worked and so that was a very interesting opportunity getting to learn how snap circuits worked how circuits worked and then also being able to teach others so that's me and my brother um we were working with a Raspberry Pi at the time trying to make like a photo booth type app um here's us with the Raspberry Pi so I had a little bit of an experience at this point but my brother

didn't know anything about programming and so we went through every step and we looked through how the computer thinks and how exactly we can tell it what we wanted to do and we started with Legos lovely Legos in the background so I've mostly been coming to these because my dad brought me the first few years um so he would come to all these conferences and one time he was the Fox for the wireless CTF so CTF stands for capture the flag and I don't know much about it other than there's a Fox and you try to find the Fox but we have one of those this year it's wonderful and apparently it's very fun if you get

to be the Fox or if you can find the Fox so I do know a little bit about my first project so in fourth grade we were told to study the founding fathers right like George Washington and people like that so being that I was in fourth grade you know how do you study like what is that I made a Xcode app for my mom's iPhone isn't that fun so I have very minimal experience that it was it was my very first project but that opened my eyes and it helped me to see that computers will do what you tell them to you just have to figure out how to talk to them so who's ready for a competition anyone

so I need three volunteers all right how about you two can come together and please bring your adult you can come on up and then way back there you can come on up too and everyone please bring your adult so we're gonna try to find out who can put words in alphabetical order first a computer or our volunteers all right so all righty so who wants to be our volunteer working with the computer you okay so if you want to step over here and then who wants to put the words in alphabetical order who's good at that you're good at that all right so hold onto those cards and then our last volunteer you're going to

keep time okay

all right hold on to that so what's going to happen is our volunteer on the computer here let's do this

all right so you're gonna hit enter okay and this is the Enter key but wait until I say go okay and then it's gonna pop up to lists okay the first one is not a political and then the second one is okay and then you're gonna put the words in alphabetical order all right and then first one to finish I want you to put your hands up okay and then when someone puts their hands up you're gonna start keeping time okay and then when the other person finishes you put your hands up and then you stop the time okay are we ready okay ready set go that's what your yourself cheers up

all right can you say that it go ahead all right did everyone hear that okay no 19 point 87 seconds and who won the computer why don't you tell everyone how it worked I don't know and then how did you guys put the words in alphabetical order we we just have the alphabet memorized because we just put them in the order like from the one that's first in the alphabet to the one that's lost in the alphabet like a dictionary or like an encyclopedia alright so let's go over exactly how the computer thought through that in regards to how our volunteers thought through that so on the computer this is what he first saw this list of words not quite

in alphabetical order yet and then when the words popped up in alphabetical order right is that what you saw all right so do you want to know how it thought through that okay here we go so this was written in Python for those of you that know a Python is it's basically a language that both humans can understand and computers can understand so we're just gonna go quickly through the code so we know exactly how it put the words in alphabetical order yeah so first we gave it the words right all these words on the note cards over here and then we set our window so where it was gonna draw the blocks and then we

had to teach it a trick we had to teach it how to show us what the words were right so it's just like training a dog right you have to tell it how it works how it should do it and then later you can call it and say hey can you do that trick for me and then we tell it can you do that trick for me can you put the words just as they are can you show them to me and then it's sorts of words by alphabetical order then it sleeps for three seconds just just waiting for a second and then it draws out our words in alphabetical order showing us that it completed its task

and then it closes the window right all right that's testing so I ran it over and over again to see if it worked right yeah so thank you to our volunteers [Applause] so let's talk about what exactly computers are doing for us so we saw that the computer was able to put the words in alphabetical order first and that's really cool so computers are mainly used to process data into information so taking numbers or letters and putting them into words and then abstracting them even farther than that so it makes a pattern out of numbers so it's like it's all that the first letter of each word was different and then it put them into a pattern that we already

recognize and computers are really just a tool for humans to compute faster you know hence the name computers they compute computers so if you want to learn more about how exactly computers process data and how they secure your data be sure to visit the crypto village and then if you want to learn more about the physical components of the computer and how they are processing the data be sure to visit the destruction village so there you can also play the tech scavenger hunt to get a walkthrough of what each and every component is doing all right so who knows what the cloud is anyone oh good good so I'm not really talking about the cloud I'm talking about a weather cloud

maybe one that turns blue when it's raining or purple when it's snowing so these are run by a Raspberry Pi right that's not this or this it's more like this it's about this big so very very small kind of like the size of a cell phone so these are relatively inexpensive little tiny computers and they have a wide variety of purposes you can use them to make a cloud you can use them for your school maybe one day you'll bring it to your school and your teacher will lock it in a filing cabinet and lose the key maybe you have to open that filing cabinet you never know so it's very important to understand how to pick locks and

security because your teacher might lose your Raspberry Pi and you got to find it so if you visit the lockpick village they'll walk you through how to pick locks and they'll help you to understand what exactly physical security is how like if you had a lock hard enough with a hammer it might open but you didn't have the keys and through that you'll improve your knowledge as a future consumer so you'll know maybe I shouldn't buy a super expensive lock because I can just hit it with a hammer and it'll open and you'll also explore security theater which is very prominent in election machines and that's what that picture is so it's basically how you think something's secure but maybe

it's not and with raspberry PI's you may notice that there's really no like screen there's no keyboard like how do I talk to this so you have to solder pieces onto it and soldering you basically take two wires and in order to make an electrical connection you melt the solder and then connect the two wires and then electricity can flow through allowing one device to talk to another so these are very very hot right extremely hot it has to melt metal so sometimes you might make a mistake you might burn yourself but that's ok you'll just have a little tiny scar it's really nothing it's fine but it's a mistake and you'll learn from that mistake you'll

know like oh I can't touch myself with a soldering iron it will hurt and mistakes can also happen in the form of maybe overheating a motherboard and it starts smoking you know things like that happen but it's ok we can fix them yeah this is a 3d printer so this was built at home that's me and my friend faith um so our directions were in a foreign language I don't even know what language it was so if we just kind of put it together and that's why the motherboard started smoking but you know it's okay we ordered another one we fixed it up yes no like when you turn the stove on and sometimes some smoke pops up just like that or

when you have a campfire and all their smoke goes in the trees like that type of smoke but it was okay because my friend and I were able to figure it out and that's the great thing about friends always help you learn if you have a question they'll help you answer the question if you need someone to talk to they'll talk to you if you have ideas but you don't know how to get the computer to understand start by explaining it to your friend and maybe they'll be able to help you and a lot of friends can be found through different groups like girls who code your school local coding communities maker spaces or FIRST LEGO League so I competed in FIRST

LEGO League for a few years and it was an amazing opportunity so you compete regionally statewide worldwide whatever you want um and you make Lego robots who here likes Legos right yeah we like Legos now you can make them into a robot like what that's super cool so you compete in teams of two to ten so it can be just you and one friend or you and a whole bunch of friends um it's available in some schools um other schools that it's not available in you are able to have a team at your home and that's what the alligator thingies were so we were a home team because my elementary school didn't have a robotics

team but they had a robotics table so one day we just picked it up and we brought it home and we got donations from different community members and we started up a team so we competed for four years so that's our fifth grade year and all of middle school we made it all the way to International invitationals once and that was pretty cool because we have to meet people from Uruguay like what so there it was very hard to communicate with people because we're all from different cultures and spoke different languages but we were able to bond over FIRST LEGO League and we really played cards for a lot at the time but all the

years that we participated in FIRST LEGO League we stayed friends we kept communicating with each other even though we went to different high schools different middle schools we were all over the place some people were interested in theater somewhere in band some did sports like we were really interested in a whole different things but we were able to stay friends and stay together and keep learning about technology and FIRST LEGO League and communicating with people and just getting things done yep and we just kept on competing so I'd like to give a friendly reminder always give back to your community they're your home they're where you start out right so you always want to volunteer and you always want to

be willing to teach others because if you know something you should tell everyone else right they might be interested in what you have to say or they might not be but you'll learn from that and you'll learn from other people and through giving back you'll really broaden your interests because you have your experiences but what about everyone else right they all have their own lives and they're all having their own experience um and in volunteering you're providing access to different things for different people so if you have access to a Lego robot and you know someone that doesn't you can make a team with them right you can help them learn how to use that

robot and you'll become an active community member which is very important because the people around you they're gonna slip a little bit class become the media center you talk about whatever you want and through this we've been able to go to the Board of Ed and tell them hey this is happening at our high school it's probably happening at others maybe you should change it and this has really helped with legacy building right cuz someday I'm gonna graduate high school someday you're gonna graduate from your school you'll graduate high school to maybe college then you'll get a job maybe you'll leave your top but you want people remember who you were and what you did so it's

very important to leave a legacy so that don't know oh that person was really cool maybe five questions I can go talk to them and nor did um have a legacy you have to set goals and you have to get yourself to achieve them because if you don't achieve something well then you didn't achieve it right so yeah always aim always have a legacy to leave behind thank you [Applause] so if we have any questions yeah that would be the time to ask any questions you have about anything I spoke about yeah I plan to yes I plan to go to college and study computers a little bit more yeah

yeah the villages so they'll be in the crypt kids little room um hello so for those who've not been here before the crypt kids you're gonna go all the way down the hall to Congressional see there is a registration table there where you'll get banded and connect it to your parents so no weirdo parents try to sneak off with you but they're probably gonna start lining up for that because the doors open in about five minutes and we'll have all the villages set up and there will have the crypto we've got Legos we've got trash int we've got destruction in a text scavenger hunt we've got W CTF I heard there may be foxes and hounds so you're gonna have a

wonderful time but before you leave give everyone a huge round of applause and a thank you to miss Samantha [Applause]