You already know more about how these platforms feel from the inside than most of the adults in your life. What we offer is a way to turn that fluency into a skill set, a portfolio, and — if you stay with it — a career.
C-YAC is not a club
It’s a working council. You’ll teach. You’ll run workshops. You’ll host parent nights and stand in front of the parents of your school and explain — better than we ever could — what is actually on the platforms their kids use.
You’ll pair with cybersecurity practitioners who have done this work for a decade or more. They will treat you as a collaborator, not a student to be talked down to.
The pledge that opens every C-YAC session is the same one we use in the classroom: I am a hacker — for good.
What you actually do
- Peer-teach. Design and run sessions for younger students at your school or in your community.
- Host parent nights. Stand in front of the parents of your community and show them what the actual platforms look like — the dark patterns, the recommendation algorithms, the in-app currency loops. This is the single most powerful thing C-YAC does, because nobody else can do it.
- Build a public portfolio. Articles, talks, workshop materials you authored, demonstrations you ran. By Year 12, this is a CV that opens doors.
- Pair with volunteer specialists. Cybersecurity practitioners, designers, educators, psychologists. You bring the question, they bring the lens.
- Feed into internships. Local businesses and partner organisations offer internships to C-YAC students.
What you get from it
A portfolio of public work. A mentor or two. References that mean something. Internship pathways. Membership in a community that takes you seriously.
And — this is the part nobody tells you about clubs — the actual skill of standing in front of a room, explaining something hard, and changing minds. That skill compounds with every workshop you run.
How we teach
Discovery before labels. You surface the patterns of persuasive design by becoming the designer yourself — Red Team to find the tricks, Blue Team to redesign for user respect. Vocabulary lands after evidence.
Sessions are deliberately analogue — paper and sticky notes. The medium is the message. You will not learn to defend against attention-capture design by sitting on a device.
How to join
If your school or community already has a C-YAC chapter, ask the adult lead — they’ll know what to do next.
If your school doesn’t have one yet, send us your school’s name and one sentence about why this matters to you. We’ll work with you and an adult at your school to start one. If you can get four to twelve curious students together, that’s a chapter.
If you’re writing to us on your own, please put a parent or guardian in copy. We won’t start without their involvement.