SaTC: EDU: Collaborative: Curriculum to Broaden Participation in Cybersecurity for Middle School Teachers and Students (CyberMiSTS)

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The Curriculum to Broaden Participation in Cybersecurity for Middle School Teachers and Students (CyberMiSTS) project will develop and pilot summer workshops that provide middle school Career and Technical Education (CTE) teachers with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to actively engage their students and expose them to cybersecurity concepts and careers. Bringing in cybersecurity expertise from a variety of sources, the CyberMiSTS curriculum will be accessible to middle school students and teachers because it will emphasize the important role of humans in cybersecurity. Teachers will learn from cybersecurity researchers, engage in hands-on activities, and customize cybersecurity course materials for their own classrooms. The CyberMiSTS curriculum will focus on key concepts and big questions to encourage participation from a broad and diverse set of students. Using a design research methodology to develop the training approach, with teachers from the first cohort sharing their experiences and mentoring a second cohort, the project team will study what CTE teachers need to be successful teaching cybersecurity in a middle school classroom. The project builds on lessons learned from a previous SaTC EDU project by incorporating Comic-BEE, a novel online system for creating educational, branching web comics. Branching stories provide opportunities to explore cause and effect. The comic style is engaging to middle school students who are disinclined to read long texts, and can incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy with the potential to reach more students. After the summer workshop, teachers will the materials in their classrooms, and measure student learning and interest in cybersecurity careers with instruments provided by the project team. In the future, workshop materials and curriculum will be offered as an online continuing education course.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.