CyberCSP: Integrating cybersecurity into the computer science principles course
Sumita Mishra, Rajendra K. Raj, Paul T. Tymann, Jamie Fagan, Sage Miller · 2017
The demand for cybersecurity professionals is projected to grow substantially, with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that employment in cybersecurity within the US will grow by 18% from 2014 to 2024, much faster than the average for all occupations. As creating a cyberspace workforce has become a matter of national security for every country, cybersecurity needs to be taught at all levels, to all students, in the educational system. The good news is that cybersecurity is also a topic that students from a wide variety of backgrounds find interesting, and as a result, it motivates them to study computing too. Over the past two decades, there has been an increased effort worldwide to incorporate computer science and computational thinking into the middle and high school curriculum. The CS10K initiative in the US has led to projects to introduce computer science at the K-12 educational level. One of these initiatives, the new Advanced Placement (AP) course in Computer Science Principles (CSP), was designed to introduce computer science in an engaging way, show students how computing is relevant in their lives, and to attract a diverse group of students to computing. The CSP Curriculum Framework allows for multiple implementations of the CSP course, permitting course designers to develop courses to engage and attract specific groups of students and that focus on specific themes in computing. This paper describes an approach to develop a new CSP course, CyberCSP, which integrates cybersecurity first principles throughout the course. The approach builds on an CSP course that was created from a previous collaboration between the Computer Science Department at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, and the Webster Central School District in Webster, New York. The paper discusses the background, details of the earlier CSP course, how relevant cybersecurity content was identified, and then integrated into the CSP course to create the CyberCSP variant of the Computer Science Principles course.