Reflections of Cybersecurity Workshop for K-12 Teachers and High School Students

Abstract

In this paper, we describe efforts to promote a robust cyber security workforce through a series of online workshops for K-12 teachers and grades 7-12 students. In 2021, we provided virtual workshops to high school teachers and students to increase cyber security awareness in three areas, (i) general cybersecurity issues, (ii) software security, and (iii) hardware security. The workshops employed Google classroom and Jupyter Notebooks, and high school teachers were provided with hardware (Raspberry Pi Zeros) to use as part of the workshops. We describe the design and implementation of the workshops and share evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of the workshops and provide insights for future professional development for teachers. Our central question was: What impact do workshops have on teachers' preparation to effectively teach cybersecurity topics to their students and what do teachers report learning from their experiences in the workshop? We provide insights into workshops' effectiveness for computer science teachers and for STEM teachers who are not computer science teachers.