Discipline: Science and Mathematics Education
Subcategory: Education
Session: 2
Room: Park Tower 8212
Beatriz Galarza - The University of Texas at San Antonio
The goal of this study is to create a curriculum for Cybersecurity and Cloud Computing in high school; the sample of students is from underrepresented minorities and vulnerable populations. The hypothesis is that if high school students are educated in Computational Thinking and Systems Thinking early on they will be more successful in Cybersecurity career paths. The population addressed will help to secure a diverse workforce and consequently decrease the shortage of professionals in the field. In the presentation, I will be giving an example of the curricular content.
The Cybersecurity Industry has a shortage of skilled professionals that by the year 2020 it is expected to reach 1.5 million unfilled positions. Women, African-American and Hispanics account for less than 12 percent of the information security workforce in the US. Creating a curriculum that gives these students skills before they finish high school and helps them continue in the field will help fill the pipeline needed to fulfill the demand of professionals. The C-SPECC created UTSA is training five high school teachers enrolled in a Certificate for STEM education. The teachers learned to develop curriculum and lesson plans meaningful for the students and that are focused on Cybersecurity and Cloud Computing.
A qualitative methodology based on observations was used to determine if the fundamental concepts for cybersecurity such as computational thinking, critical, systems thinking and problem resolution were incorporated in the teachers’ curriculum for high school. The deliverables were: a proposed curriculum and a lesson plan that developed one aspect of computational thinking. The results were measured through observation and documentation of the process of learning the teachers followed. The curriculum developed included teaching the students a system thinking and computational thinking approach to Cybersecurity. The high school teachers were observed during the semester, they learned the advantages of problem-based learning and model-eliciting activities and incorporated them in the curriculum. The tools taught will allow the students to be flexible and prepared to learn technology as a fast pace changing area.
We conclude that the pipeline of students that will become Cybersecurity professionals and will be part of the workforce needs reinforcement. Helping underrepresented students remain in the pipeline and continue their studies in Cybersecurity fields will help decrease the shortage of professionals needed in the field. The approach on computational thinking given during the first year of research helped the teacher-scholars understand and transmit the importance of learning the foundations, the basics in order to succeed when more technical skills are required.
Reference:
Addressing the Diversity Gap in Cybersecurity. (August 10, 2016) Retrieved from https://securityintelligence.com/news/addressing-the-diversity-gap-in-cybersecurity-join-the-ibm-icmcp-summit-in-october/
Funder Acknowledgement(s): This study was supported by a grant from NSF (#1736209) awarded to UTSA Center for Security and Privacy Enhanced Cloud Computing (C-SPECC).
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Guadalupe Carmona, Guadalupe.Carmona@utsa.edu
Role: I have worked together with my advisor, Dr. Guadalupe Carmona, to create the curriculum for the high school teachers, I made the observations and participated as a STEM expert in the Certificate. I collected and analyzed the results of the deliverables.