219 girls from Year 3, 4 and 5 participate in Mastercard’s flagship STEM programme

Dubai, March 08, 2022: Repton School Abu Dhabi and Mastercard have collaborated to bring Girls4Tech STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) programme to Year 3, 4 and 5 students.

The Fry Campus at Repton Abu Dhabi invited 219 Reptonians to participate in the online STEM programme, facilitated by expert volunteers from Mastercard.

The session focused on inquiry-based and hands-on activities spanning key scenarios under three disciplines: Detection, Encryption and All Things Digital, which connect Mastercard’s technology to STEM principles. Each concept was supplemented with interactive sessions to engage and build students skills. 

In the first discipline, Detection, students explored the concept of fraud detection by listening to sample data clusters of customer buying patterns, analysing buying patterns of different customers and describing patterns to identify potential fraud activity. 

As part of the second discipline, Encryption, students traversed the realms of symmetric and asymmetric encryption. Using the applications of scytales and Navajo language code, students were able to model symmetric encryption, discuss the shortfalls and use padlocks, keys and tokenisation to visualise asymmetric encryption. 

In the final discipline, All Things Digital, students explored the concept of digital convergence; arranging the familiar technologies (music, reading, photo and payment) from the least to most technologically advanced. Students participated in live demonstrations of Near Field Communications (NFC) and learned about biometrics and visual identification technologies.

The Girls4Tech programme, now in its final instalment with Repton schools, has supported STEM skill development of 390 girls from Repton Al Barsha, Repton School Dubai and Repton School Abu Dhabi.