Outreach
Research Experience for Teachers
John Franco led a summer Research Experience for Teachers project entitled Secure Cyberspace. Team members included one middle school math/STEM teacher, one high school math teacher, a graduate student and a high school senior in addition to the faculty mentor and academic coordinator. The outcomes of this project were:
- The teachers learned much about systems that ensure confidentiality, authentication and message integrity
- The teachers put together two units and four activities to be used in their STEM classes this coming academic year.
This project was supported by the National Science Foundation. The project will be extended next year, details to be determined.
As a result of this project about 60 middle school students will visit the University of Cincinnati in September to attend a talk and demonstration by Jason Armstrong, SEAL for Penn State University, on cryptography. Specifically, Jason will demonstrate the operation of an Engima machine that is on loan from the National Cryptologic Museum, describe crypto puzzles suitable for motivated middle school students, and introduce the codebreaker challenge. Some of the middle school students will actually encode messages on the Enigma machine while others decrypt the messages using a java applet that was developed during the RET project mentioned above.
Summer Camp in Information Technology
Chengcheng Li completed the first summer camp of DITLE (Design-based IT Learning Experience) project which is funded by NSF ITEST program (#1433769). Forty seven students from six local public high schools and pre-service teachers attended the 3-week camp learning essential IT skills. Cybersecurity was a major theme. Five out of the six student teams chose cybersecurity as their research projects during camp. They conducted research with the teachers and advisors. They presented their projects on the last day of the camp to the UC team and their parents. Survey data are under analysis and will be published later this year.
Cybersecurity Symposium
Chengcheng Li and Northern Kentucky University have planned a cybersecurity symposium. Li invited CS, PS, UCIT, and other cybersecurity related UC departments to the discussion. The format and the timeframe of this symposium are as yet undetermined.