"In our globally connected and tech-driven world, the demand for knowledgeable cybersecurity professionals has never been greater. This course introduces cryptographic elements and obfuscation of information via complex puzzles and ciphers. See how encryption turns numbers, text, images, and sounds into a scrambled stream—and puts them all back together again. Then take a look into modern cybersecurity to see how these time-proven methods are still protecting information in the digital age. After you've received your security clearance, learn how information can be hidden and stored in digital mediums like pictures, music, and videos. Dive into hashing algorithms like SHA and RSA, use Linux, and discover the aspects of cryptography, security, and encryption needed to speak this new language. Set out on your professional journey into this growing field."

https://www.idtech.com/courses/cybersecurity-lab-encryption-and-steganography

AES or Advanced Encryption Standard is "a U.S. Government-approved cryptographic algorithm that can be used to protect electronic data. The AES algorithm is a symmetric block cipher that can encrypt (encipher) and decrypt (decipher) information." 

https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/advanced-encryption-standard 

With help from my instructors at camp I was able to create AES from scratch. To be honest this was not easy for I have never taken Calculus I or II let alone Pre-Calculus. This only made my endeavor to learn how to code this complicated encryption process even harder. But I was lucky to have such great instructors who taught me all the calculus I needed and helped me through every coder's worst nightmare, syntax errors. With such a complex program I ran into many syntax errors. So many that I had to switch the program I was coding in. The original coding software I started with did not support my code and the commands that I was using so I switched over to Sublime Text. Using Sublime Text I created a message that would be encoding using AES and then decoded using AES. I created a key and a message. Unfortunately, Sublime Text does not support user input so I was unable to ask the user what he or she wanted the message to be. Instead, for every new input, you have to change what the message says on line 509.  That message is encrypted (below on the left) and converts the plain text into cyphertext. After that, the cyphertext is decrypted (below on the right) and becomes plaintext again.