NSF Award
1516100
The EDURange project, a collaboration between Evergreen State College and Lewis and Clark College, will support faculty teaching cyber security by providing hands-on exercises, a student-staffed help-desk, and webinars. These resources will be designed to be easy to deploy and will be interactive, competitive and collaborative to ensure student engagement. The availability of these resources will make it easier for computer science faculty with little prior background to teach security across, and will increase the number of schools teaching cyber security concepts. As a result this project will produce more students with the analytical skills required to secure computing assets in the Pacific Northwest and in turn will help to ensure American technical competitiveness in the future. <br/><br/>The resources will be linked to the concepts and learning outcomes defined in the IEEE/ACM CS Curricula 2013 report. Support for these resources will be provided by a student-run help desk and a user interface that will allow faculty to modify exercises to fit the content and level of difficulty of their classes. Background material will be provided for students to make the exercises applicable to a variety of computer science classes. These resources will fulfill four important needs: (1) expanding and disseminating technology ? improving exercises using EDURange, a flexible, cloud-based teaching infrastructure, (2) faculty development ? helping them use hands-on security exercises in their classrooms and providing curricular resources, (3) student engagement ? developing their skills, leveraging their talent and knowledge, and mentoring them to become the next generation of teachers and researchers, and (4) education research --investigating the acquisition of analytical skills. <br/><br/>Assessment of the resources will focus on four activities: (1) a quantitative evaluation and summary of how often and how widely the resources are used, (2) a qualitative assessment of how well exercises map or express the cyber security knowledge units of CS2013, (3) an assessment of faculty experience using the resources in their courses, and (4) an evaluation of the experience using the resources by security faculty, professionals, and students.
