Center for Information Assurance teaches high school students about cybersecurity at annual summer camp
July 9, 2026
Twenty high school students from different schools across the Greater Memphis Area spent three days at the Herff College of Engineering learning about cybersecurity through the Center for Information Assurance (CFIA)’s 2026 Cyber Ambassadors Tech Camp.
The camp started Wednesday, July 8, with a welcome from Dr. Dipankar Dasgupta and Dr. Hasan Ali, temporary chair of Herff’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“I just think it’s a great camp for students who are already engineering-minded. They already have STEM on their radar and they’re ready to select what parts of STEM they want to go into. Hopefully, they’ll select cybersecurity because it’s a great field to get into at a young age. I just think it’s great to be able to work with STEM-oriented students,” said Doris Allen, one of the camp’s organizers and a member of CFIA at the University of Memphis.
Consisting of 9th – 12th grade students from Collierville, Barlett, Memphis and homeschool, co-organizer Francis Smith-Brown said, in today’s age, it’s more vital than ever for students to learn the importance of digital safety.
“Cyber attacks are important for them to learn at a young age, even younger than high-school age, honestly,” Smith-Brown said. “Our world is pretty much digital at this point. So, everything that students learn and interact with now has some sort of digital interface.”
More than 60 students applied to take part in the camp. Due to funding limits, CFIA was only able to accept 20. During the application process, students answered a variety of questions to gauge their interest in cybersecurity and engineering.
Those students listened to several lectures throughout the three days on topics including cyber safety and privacy and basic Python programming and were also treated to a tour of the University of Memphis data center. The week's activities culminated in an electric toy car race, a demonstration on how bad actors may hack such cars and a closing ceremony on Friday.
“Basically, the students are learning about programming and cybersecurity through building out autonomous cars. We’ll have three of the professors come in to share cybersecurity knowledge…By the end of the camp, they will program their own cars as a team. They’ll program their cars and race them in a competition. Each team will be awarded at the end of the camp based on their race,” Smith-Brown said.
It's an important topic for anyone to understand, whether they're a middle-school student or an adult. Allen gave some advice for people who find themselves victims of a cyberattack.
“If it’s banking, call your bank immediately and let them know someone is in your account and doing things, and the bank will usually handle it. They’ll probably tell you to come in, change all your accounts and all your passwords and all that and that’s what a student should do too. A student should tell their parents that they got strange emails. You’ll need to go to your bank, maybe disengage your Instagram or Facebook temporarily until we figure out what’s going on and how they got into your stuff,” Allen said.
The camp is just one of many events CFIA hosts throughout the year, including workshops and professional development courses. Smith-Brown said she hopes to expand the camp to include more days and more activities in the coming years.
“We’re actively seeking sponsorships and seeking more grant support to help bring in more staff, more people to help cover more days and maybe stretch the camp out a little longer and maybe even being able to offer it to more students,” Smith-Brown said. “If this could go on two weeks, that would be fabulous, because the first week they could do more lectures and the second week they could do all the hands-on stuff. They could do their own testing of each other’s cars. It would just be more expansive if they could come for two weeks. That would be great.”