Cybersecurity Education

We create assessment tools for measuring the effectiveness of various pedagogies for teaching and learning cybersecurity.  We also create learning modules and educational games.

In addition, we administer cybersecurity scholarships (NSF SFS and DoD CySP) and organize cohort activities for cybersecurity scholarship students.

Current Projects:

The CATS Project is creating and validating two concept inventories—conceptual tests of understanding—that can be used to measure the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching and learning cybersecurity.

The Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) is for students who have recently completed any first course in cybersecurity

 

 The Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment (CCA) is for students who have recently completed an undergraduate major or track in cybersecurity.

Each assessment tool comprises 25 multiple-choice questions of various difficulties that target the same five core concepts, but the CCA assumes greater technical background.

Learn More     Help Validate CCA

We are developing a web-based multi-player game that teaches adversarial thinking in a network controlled by a Dolev-Yao adversary. Players attempt to arrange a meeting time and place by sending messages through this insecure network.

We administer NSF SFS scholarships to UMBC at all levels (BS, MS, MPS, Ph.D.) and orchestrate cohort activities including an annual research study that analyzes the security of an aspect of the UMBC network.

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We administer DoD CySP scholarships to UMBC.

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Once every two years (next in fall 2022), we offer the special topics course CMSC-491/691 Cybersecurity Research in which students form small groups and carry out research under the mentorship of a technical director from NSA or a national lab.

Publication