The students are from Albuquerque, Española, Gallup, Bluff, Shiprock, and the South Valley

Rotterdam, the Netherlands - This morning, Albuquerque’s Cultivating Coders announced that ten New Mexico and Navajo Nation students will travel this weekend to the Netherlands for an exclusive, intensive, and international cyber security training called CyberHeroes. The one-week training program begins Monday, March 18th and will bring together twenty talented youth from the Netherlands, New Mexico, and the Navajo Nation to be trained in ethical hacking skills to address current security threats. Over the course of one week, they will take on hacker battles, work on CSI-type cyber challenges with local police, study the history of cryptography, learn to fight cyber crime alongside international hackers, and much more.

“This opportunity for our students is unparalleled, but our mission at Cultivating Coders is to continue to create many more opportunities like CyberHeroes to empower youth in underserved, inner-city, tribal, and rural communities across New Mexico and the United States,” said Charles Ashley III, CEO and Founder of Cultivating Coders. “Cultivating Coders is at the forefront of preparing our overlooked tribal, rural, and inner-city youth to fill the most critical technology careers in the United States, and now we aren’t just bringing our coding bootcamps anywhere in the country, but also the world.”

The ten participants are high school students or college freshman from Albuquerque, Bluff, Española, Gallup, Shiprock, and the South Valley. The travel and training are being made possible by Cultivating Coders, the United States Embassy in the Netherlands, Cyberworkplace, Revnext, Radically Open Security, Municipality of Rotterdam, Hacklab, Cybersprint, KPN, and 42 Workspace.

Click here to view the students’ curriculum and click here to learn more about Cultivating Coders.