High school teachers try to hack it at NYU Poly Cyber Security Boot Camp
This week, a select group of high school teachers from around the country will begin a high-intensity boot camp program at the downtown Brooklyn campus of Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly). But rather than scaling walls or doing push-ups, these educators will be learning the ropes in computer security as part of a program to help teachers mentor the cyber security experts of tomorrow.
The National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored program is a collaboration between NYU-Poly and CUNY New York City College of Technology. It is an outgrowth of NYU-Poly’s Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), an annual competition that unites teams of high school and college students for a week of white-hat hacking, forensics, capture-the-flag and embedded systems challenges. Now in its ninth year, CSAW is a premier cyber security education event, attracting students from across the globe.
CSAW Cyber Security Summer Boot Camp is part of NYU-Poly study funded by the NSF to gauge the effectiveness of cyber security competitions in encouraging high schoolers to pursue careers in the field. It will also explore ways of boosting the number of women entering cyber security. Women and minorities are dramatically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.
Twenty-six high school math and science teachers from 13 states will participate in this first, all-expense-paid CSAW Cyber Security Summer Boot Camp. Teachers will receive training in the fundamentals of cyber forensics and other security-related disciplines. They will participate in cyber security challenges similar to those mounted each year at CSAW. Teachers will also learn to integrate cyber security into their computer science curricula for the classroom.
