Engaging K-12 Students with Real-World Experiences from Cybersecurity Professionals

Abstract: Cybersecurity is a topic of critical importance in our world today, and it is increasingly important for middle school and high school students to learn the concepts of cybersecurity. At this point in time students are not required to take a course in cybersecurity, although it is available as an elective in some schools. They often are only given bits and pieces of information about cybersecurity and personal safety at school. Thus, summer camps focused on cybersecurity are a great way for students to learn more about this topic. In summer camps at Texas A&M University, students learned about cybersecurity through experiential learning in safe environments, games, lectures, and presentations from university faculty and cybersecurity professionals. In this paper, we focus on the presentations from cybersecurity professionals from various university departments and from outside the university. We identify six cybersecurity concepts addressed - availability, keeping it simple, defense in depth, confidentiality, thinking like an adversary, and integrity. We describe some of the presentations that students heard that illustrated these concepts and how they applied to students' lives. Some of the presentation topics we discuss center around safe online behavior, social engineering, and cyber attacks. In addition, the increasing need for cybersecurity professionals in many different fields was shared with students, along with several different pathways to take towards those careers. We provide the results from students' daily reflections about their learning from these presentations. The results include frequencies from multiple-choice questions about the level of learning they gained from the presentations and free response questions for which they chose an activity or presentation from the day as their greatest learning opportunity of the day and explained what they learned. Finally, we discuss how the camp experience and knowledge gained by students is an important part of their learning in regard to cybersecurity, with suggestions about carrying on the work of educating secondary students about cybersecurity is important in decisions they make regularly in their lives.

Keywords: K12 Engagement, K12 Summer Camp, K12 Cybersecurity Education

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007045

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