Problem:
Social media and smartphones attract young people
like magnets. They also attract cyber criminals.
Our goal: Create responsible cyber-citizens of
the future and among some of them spark passion to
pursue a major in computer science or related fields.
Challenges the project will address: Working
with local and regional high school faculty, it has
become apparent that there are several challenges to
accomplishing these goals: lack of resources at
the high schools (educational material, hardware, and
software); lack of faculty expertise in cyber-security;
lack of opportunity to practice and assess
cyber-security competencies. Four strategies are
being employed to overcome these challenges:
Conduct
online and on-site workshops for faculty
Conduct
joint cyber-defense exercise
Develop
a dual-enrolled course that is online and asynhronous.
Our approach:
In addition to the several efforts to introduce cyber
security to high school students in K12, there are other
efforts at community colleges to introduce cyber security
(e.g., Cyberwatch). Most of these efforts are fairly
comprehensive involving a rigorous curriculum in CISCO
networking and security. However, most of these efforts
are aimed at students who are already interested in cyber
security. We are different in the following ways
The project is not only for the highly
motivated high school students but also for those
who may have not considered STEM as a field of study
before.
Security
topics are covered around a theme to which high school
students can relate. Based on feedback from high
school teacher’s, cyber-security education is built
around the theme of social media.
This
project provides teachers with an incentive to
incorporate cyber-security into their curriculum by
providing them not only with all of the necessary
teaching and lab materials, but also access to all of
the needed hardware and software infrastructure. This
reduces preparation time, shortens the learning curve,
and reduces the need for costly hardware and software
Join Us!
If you are a community
college or a high school or a Governor's School, you
can join us as a co-collaborator in:
Offering the course to your students
yourself -- we will provide all the course
material and access to remote labs free of charge!
Offering the course to your students
through Radford University (this is an option for
schools in the state of Virginia, looking for dual
enrollment courses). A MOU will have to be signed
and the course will be offered for free from
Radford University to your students (your students
may have to pay for any textbooks as well as any
fees/tuition that your school charges).
Offer to help us edit or modify our
syllabus. The material is all open-source and we
invite comments.
Phase 1 of this project, funded by the
NSA (NSA MEPP Grant# H98230-13-1-0158), was
completed in May of 2014. Currently we are working
on Phase 2 of the project (also funded by the
NSA).