Cliché-free career guidance for children and young people
On April 3, 2025, we once again opened our doors to twelve IT enthusiasts aged between 10 and 16 as part of this year's Future Day. Under the motto "A day in IT - encryption basics with Caesar", the children immersed themselves in the exciting world of cryptography. With great interest, commitment and enthusiasm, they worked together on the encryption and decryption of texts and learned the basics of Caesar encryption.
First practical steps
After a brief welcome and a tour of the company, the program got underway: our colleagues explained to the children how the ancient Romans used Caesar encryption to transmit secret messages, the importance of this type of encryption in today's digital world and what data protection and information security have to do with it.
During the work phase, the children used the pair programming approach to independently develop their first encryption algorithms in JavaScript. To do this, they used an online IDE with a live compiler (Replit), which enabled them to try out their code directly. The aim was to independently encrypt and decrypt messages according to the Caesar principle. The central basics of JavaScript programming such as variables, methods and loops were taught in a practical way. The tasks consisted of understanding how encryption works and then putting this into practice in the code. These concrete tasks not only promoted technical understanding, but also teamwork, logical thinking and creative problem-solving. Depending on the age of the children, the tasks were individually adapted so that the older ones could contribute their first experiences from school courses to more difficult tasks.
An exciting day in the world of IT
The joint pizza break provided a welcome refreshment, during which the children discussed their previous experiences, made new friends and looked forward to the next tasks with anticipation. Another programming round followed in the afternoon, in which the teams of two finalized their tasks. The results were then presented - and they were impressive! There was no doubt that the participants included potential developers of tomorrow. And so a day full of tinkering, learning and teamwork came to an end - perhaps for some it was even the first step towards a promising future in IT.