In today's digital landscape, the demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals is higher than ever. However, many educational programs primarily focus on theoretical concepts, leaving students with insufficient practical skills. To address this gap, students need actionable feedback on their hands-on labs and assignments. We present an open-source scoring engine that provides iterative, step-by-step feedback, enabling students to solve complex cybersecurity problems progressively. Integrated into existing courses, this engine can enhance labs with detailed, structured feedback, bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. A preliminary study with 11 students showed that all participants could complete complex tasks using the feedback provided by the engine, with limited instruction from the authors. Additionally, about 90% of the students reported high satisfaction with the structured feedback. This approach has the potential to transform cybersecurity education, making it more interactive, practical, and aligned with real-world requirements.

The increasing sophistication of cybersecurity threats necessitates an educational approach that blends theoretical knowledge with practical experience. Many courses focus primarily on theoretical concepts, leaving students with limited hands-on experience with real-world challenges. This paper introduces a cybersecurity course model that integrates Experiential Learning Theory to provide a comprehensive hands-on learning environment. The course covers important cybersecurity topics, including SSH, VPNs, TLS, MFA, OpenID Connect, OAuth2, web server security, high availability, replication, distributed file systems, and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes. These topics are explored through a mix of lectures, peer presentations, and weekly hands-on team practices. Over three years, the course has been offered at our large public university with 72 students enrolled, consistently receiving high course ratings between 4.8 and 5.0. This paper discusses the course design, methodology, and outcomes, offering insights for educators to replicate and adapt the model for their own institutions.

Productivity methodologies and tools are crucial in technology-focused organizations, fostering efficiency and collaboration. Industry practices, such as Scrum and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), along with tools like Jira and Git, empower individuals and teams. Communication platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Confluence bridge geographical gaps. Despite their significance, a noticeable gap exists in integrating these practices into academic institutions, hindering students' transitions to the professional realm. This research focuses on effectively integrating industry best practices—Scrum, OKRs, Jira, Git, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Confluence—into academic settings to improve students' individual and team performance in the classroom and to elevate their overall readiness for industry. The study presents practical guidelines derived from interviews with industry professionals, establishing parallels between industry and academia. These guidelines encompass supplemental learning, pairing students with experienced individuals, and recommending cost-effective tools like Discord for collaboration. Scrum principles, implemented through Taiga (a free alternative to Jira) and GitHub, along with OKRs, are endorsed for project and task tracking, providing a comprehensive framework for enhanced productivity in academic contexts. An assessment of these guidelines in an intensive cybersecurity course at a large public university reveals positive outcomes. Pairing students and leveraging Discord for communication prove effective. Methodologies like Scrum and OKRs receive positive responses, with Git emerging as a favorite for collaborative work. The role of Taiga in task accountability is acknowledged. Overall, the implementation of our guidelines demonstrates a positive impact on student and team performance, emphasizing the potential for the effective integration of industry-endorsed practices in academic settings.

This innovative practice full paper discusses the development of an interactive tool designed to educate middle school students on the ethical considerations and societal impacts of artificial intelligence (AI). As AI technologies become more embedded in our daily lives, the younger generation must grasp the implications of algorithmic bias and its societal effects. Our tool aims to deepen this understanding by focusing on self-driving cars-a relevant and significant example of AI technology. The interactive tool incorporates three advanced image recognition models trained on diverse datasets, including traffic cones, animals, and pedestrians. Through the tool's interface, students can choose one of these models to apply in a self-driving car simulation and select different obstacles for the car to encounter, such as traffic cones, animals, and pedestrians. This hands-on simulation highlights the importance of comprehensive AI model training, showcasing how well-trained models help avoid collisions and the risks associated with encountering untrained obstacles. It engages students by demonstrating how developers' AI training decisions can significantly influence end-user experiences. Moreover, the tool emphasizes the need for diverse and representative data in building fair and robust AI systems. To assess the effectiveness of this educational tool, we conducted a two-day AI exhibit attended by 26 middle-school students from grades six to eight. The effectiveness was evaluated through posttrial questionnaires to measure the students' understanding of several key concepts: the development of resilient AI models, the societal impacts of AI, and the ethical considerations of road safety in the context of AI. The results showed that 84.6 % of the participants understood how poor training decisions could impact AI outcomes, and about 96 % recognized the necessity for diverse data.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have a deepening impact in our world. For empowered citizenship and career readiness, elementary and middle school students need to understand these technologies. This poster reports on five original interactive AI and ML software exhibits tested by 125 elementary and middle school students aged 7 to 14 years. Four themes emerged: Students recognized that AI and ML systems can process data from cameras (perception); they saw that these systems responded to their training input (trust); they appreciated the practical import of AI/ML systems (affective and cognitive attitudes); and students were introduced to models and modes (specialization).

Role-playing and visual interfaces are vital in computer science education, notably cybersecurity, where a concrete understanding of defensive and offensive strategies matters. In this work, we implemented a cryptography education tool combining real-world scenarios, role-playing and visual interfaces to simplify cryptography education for K-12 students. This tool covers symmetric and asymmetric cryptography and secure hashing algorithms, which are fundamental to principles like confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. Our tool's core idea is to simulate a cryptographic transaction between a user and a bank while an attacker tries to compromise the communication. Within this role-playing and visual environment, students step into the roles of both the user and the bank, using an intuitive visual interface to perform essential cryptographic operations and grasp the underlying concepts. We evaluated our educational tool on 58 students (41 middle and 17 high school students), measuring comprehension via a survey. Our analysis revealed that middle and high school students could readily understand the key operations related to symmetric cryptography, asymmetric cryptography, and hashing using our role-playing tool. Nearly all participants expressed satisfaction with the tool and were willing to recommend it to others.

This paper describes the design and evaluation of DSAScratch, an extension to Scratch, a widely used block-based programming language. The DSAScratch framework implements advanced data structures such as arrays, sets, dictionaries, and searching and sorting algorithms. By presenting these concepts in an intuitive block-based interface, these blocks abstract away technical details and simplify data structures and algorithms concepts for K-12 students to grasp and apply to programming problems more readily. A preliminary evaluation of the tools' usability and learning outcomes is presented in this paper. Given the information we have gathered about DSAScratch, we show that the extension is beneficial for students to develop a deeper understanding of programming and an intuitive understanding of these concepts in high school. We present the methodology and preliminary results of a user study conducted with ten high school students. During the user study, 70% of the participants understood the key ideas behind DSAScratch implemented data structures and algorithms through a mixture of lectures and hands-on activities. We show that DSAScratch was also an important part of the workshop for 90% of the students who participated, as it enhanced their understanding of algorithms and data structures. Furthermore, they indicated that they would recommend DSAScratch to their peers.

We have designed and developed a simple, visual, and narrative K-12 cybersecurity curriculum leveraging the Scratch programming platform to demonstrate and teach fundamental cybersecurity concepts such as confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. The visual curriculum simulates a real-world scenario of a user and a bank performing a bank transaction and an adversary attempting to attack the transaction. We have designed six visual scenarios, the curriculum first introduces students to three visual scenarios demonstrating attacks that exist when systems do not integrate concepts such as confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. Then, it introduces them to three visual scenarios that build on the attacks to demonstrate and teach how these fundamental concepts can be used to defend against them. We conducted an evaluation of our curriculum through a study with 18 middle and high school students. To evaluate the student's comprehension of these concepts we distributed a technical survey, where overall average of students answering these questions related to the demonstrated concepts is 9.28 out of 10. Furthermore, the survey results revealed that 66.7% found the system extremely easy and the remaining 27.8% found it easy to use and understand.

We have designed and developed a simple, visual, and narrative K-12 cybersecurity curriculum leveraging the Scratch programming platform to demonstrate and teach fundamental cybersecurity concepts such as confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. The visual curriculum simulates a real-world scenario of a user and a bank performing a banking transaction and an adversary attempting to attack the transaction. The curriculum first introduces students to three visual scenarios demonstrating attacks that exist when systems do not integrate the fundamental concepts of confidentiality, integrity protection, and authentication. Then, it introduces them to three visual scenarios that build on the attacks to demonstrate and teach how the fundamental concepts can be used to defend against them.

The world continues to experience a shortage of skilled cybersecurity personnel. The widely accepted solution for reducing this gap is raising awareness about cybersecurity. In response, many schools are integrating cybersecurity into the K-12 curriculum. Also, educational initiatives from the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, GenCyber, and the CryptoClub project enable universities to provide enrichment to middle- and high-school students regarding the importance of cybersecurity. Unfortunately, there is currently an absence of visual and straightforward tools that limits the feasibility of hands-on practice during these initiatives. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a new framework called CryptoScratch, which extends the Scratch programming environment with modern cryptographic algorithms (e.g., AES, RSA, SHA-256) implemented as visual blocks. Using the simple interface of CryptoScratch, K-12 students can study how to use cryptographic algorithms for services like confidentiality, authentication, and integrity protection; and then use these blocks to build complex modern cryptographic schemes (e.g., Pretty Good Privacy, Digital Signatures). In addition, we present the design and implementation of a Task Block that provides students instruction on various cryptography problems and verifies that they have successfully completed the problem. The task block also generates feedback, nudging learners to implement more secure solutions for cryptographic problems. An initial usability study was performed with 16 middle-school students where students were taught basic cryptographic concepts and then asked to complete tasks using those concepts. Once students had knowledge of a variety of basic cryptographic algorithms, they were asked to use those algorithms to implement complex cryptographic schemes such as Pretty Good Privacy and Digital Signatures. Using the successful implementation of the cryptographic and task blocks in Scratch, the initial testing indicated that $\approx 60\%$ of the students could quickly grasp and implement complex cryptography concepts using CryptoScratch, while $\approx 90\%$ showed comfort with cryptography concepts and use-cases. Based on the positive results from the initial testing, a larger study of students is being developed to investigate the effectiveness across the socioeconomic spectrum.

We have implemented a novel framework called AlgoScratch as an extension to the popular Scratch programming language. AlgoScratch is designed to simplify Data Structures and Algorithms education in the K-12 curriculum through visual and intuitive Scratch blocks. The framework implements widely used data structures such as Arrays, Stacks, Queues, Sets, and Maps; and algorithms such as Binary Search and Quick Sort. This poster discusses the implementation of the AlgoScratch blocks and their ability to simplify complex computer science concepts through visual programming that employs a simple drag and drop-based interface.

We have implemented a novel framework called CryptoScratch for teaching cryptography using the widely available Scratch platform. CryptoScratch enables K-12 students to learn how to use cryptographic algorithms such as AES, RSA, and SHA2 and combine these algorithms to build complex modern cryptographic schemes such as Digital Signatures and Pretty Good Privacy. CryptoScratch implements the algorithms as intuitive visual blocks abstracting away the mathematical and technical details of the algorithms. This poster discusses the implementation of CryptoScratch and how using these blocks can help students develop and understand the importance of cryptography in their digital lives.