On September 30, Mack Joyner, Assistant Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Master of Computer Science Program at Rice, spoke to an audience of 75 students at the Mickey Leland College Preparatory Academy for Young Men (MLCPA).
“The talk was an introduction to JavaScript. I talked about the basic structure of a client-side web application,” explained Joyner, a former software engineer for Texas Instruments.
At the end of the talk, “I showed them a web app game” and “challenged them to think about how they could use ethical hacking to improve the security of the web application,” he said. The results were impressive. “The students were engaged and came up with multiple ways to make the game much harder to play,” Joyner said. He then shared with the students “a couple of demos based on their answers.”
The Mickey Leland academy, a magnet school housed in Houston’s historically diverse Fifth Ward, offers a STEM “endorsement.” Similar to college majors, endorsements are specific curricula students choose that reflect their career interests beyond high school. The school hopes to invite more Rice CS faculty to come, share their knowledge, and provide students with career role models.