To both broaden and increase participation in any STEM field such as cybersecurity, we need to attract more students. Research shows that to do this, students need to be engaged with cybersecurity during middle school. There is a lack of age-appropriate and classroom-ready cybersecurity curriculum, however, and many teachers feel unprepared to teach the subject. To address this gap, the CyberMiSTS project team created a summer professional development workshop for middle school teachers that integrated a recent research-based understanding of cybersecurity into a curriculum that is accessible to both middle school students and their teachers. The project sought to encourage participation of a broad and diverse set of students in the field of cybersecurity by showing them how human relations play an important role in cybersecurity. We discuss our prior related work using branching web comics to introduce middle school students to cybersecurity concepts and careers, and the state of evidence-based research into effective approaches and methods for cybersecurity education. We identify challenges to broadening the pipeline for a truly diverse cybersecurity workforce that can meet industry’s need for cybersecurity professionals with a wide range of experience and skills. The paper introduces our approach for the teacher professional development workshop, maps how we designed the project to meet our research goals, and documents initial findings regarding what is needed to increase teacher self-efficacy about cybersecurity concepts and careers in a middle school classroom.
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The Synergy of Intertwining Grant Activities: Cyber Up! and GenCyber Girls
The ongoing workforce shortage of skilled and diverse cybersecurity professionals coupled with the continued upward trend of cybercrime has led to an increased number of funding opportunities from the federal government to support projects focused on technical skills development. Significant emphasis is placed on academic transfer pathways and education-to-career pathways for students from K-12 to community college and beyond. Utilizing funding from multiple sources, faculty have intertwined grant project activities to increase awareness of cybersecurity careers and academic pathways, emphasizing digital forensics and incident response. The two grant projects, Cyber Up! and GenCyber Girls, aimed to develop college-level curriculum and cybersecurity workshops for female high school students. Project activities were synthesized to create a summer camp for high school students based on the curriculum developed for the college programs in digital forensics and incident response. The synergy between the projects has shown an increase in female participation in the digital forensics course and helped build interest in cybersecurity careers among K-12 students.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1800999
- PAR ID:
- 10358586
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE Annual Conference proceedings
- ISSN:
- 1524-4644
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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