A CTF-Based Approach in Cyber Security Education for Secondary School Students

Cybersecurity education topics require technical understanding. However, it is a challenging task for any teacher to introduce topics to students who have no technical background. Recently, the concept of gamification has been implemented as a tool to inculcate student’s interest using a variety of popular in-games techniques and applying them to educational modules. Extending from this notion, it was found that Capture the Flag (CTF) competition style is a successful way of introducing students to various technical concepts in the standard computer science curriculum. During the 2019 school holiday, a CTF for secondary school students was run at Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN) with the primary goal of introducing secondary school students to various cybersecurity topics and also to inculcate their interest in cybersecurity. The method that we used is different from other CTF or similar events, in which we use a scenario-based approach. We found that this method attracts participants in solving each challenge in a competitive environment.

Intentionally educating for the social good in computer science

As exemplified in the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, the ethical responsibility of computing professionals obliges both guiding and aspirational behaviors. The guiding aspect of this responsibility includes ethical principles focused on avoiding harm and trustworthiness, while the aspirational aspect focuses on contributing to society and human well-begin. Ethical computing is often identified with the guiding principles. Though valued, they should not overshadow the aspirational aims of ethical computing. Towards this end, we advocate for a proactive pedagogy that promotes the aspirational aspects of computing for the social good throughout the computer science curriculum. This abstract presents our efforts in this direction.

From Teaching Software Engineering Locally and Globally to Devising an Internationalized Computer Science Curriculum

Software development is the process to produce an information technology solution to a real-world problem. Teaching and integrating non-technical software engineering skills into the curriculum is considered one of the most challenging tasks in an academic environment. This becomes even more challenging when the curriculum is supposed to be internationalized and applied in different countries because of the cultural difference, policy difference, and business model difference. In this chapter, the authors present their experience of teaching a software engineering course both locally and globally, where two universities of USA and China are chosen for this study. Specifically, they describe how they adjust homework assignments and student performance evaluations to reflect different government policies, different business environment, and different real-world customer requirement. The chapter shows that it is possible to create an internationalized computer science curriculum that contains both common core learning standards and adjustable custom learning standards.