Cybersecurity and Data Science Curriculum for Secondary Student Computing Programs
Richard A Lawrence, Zhenhua He, Dhruva K. Chakravorty, Wesley A. Brashear, Honggao Liu, Sandra Nite, Lisa M. Pérez, Chris P. Francis, Nikhil Dronamraju, Xin Yang, Taresh Guleria, Jeeeun Kim · The Journal of Computational Science Education · 2023
Computing programs for secondary school students are rapidly becoming a staple at High Performance Computing (HPC) centers and Computer Science departments around the country.Developing curriculum that targets specific computing subfields with unmet needs remains a challenge.Here, we report on developments in the two week Summer Computing Academy (SCA) to focus on two such subfields.During the first week, 'Computing for a Better Tomorrow: Data Sciences', introduced students to real-life applications of big data processing.A variety of topics were covered, including genomics and bioinformatics, cloud computing, and machine learning.During the second week, 'Camp Secure: Cybersecurity', focused on issues related to principles of cybersecurity.Students were taught online safety, cryptography, and internet structure.The two weeks are unified by a common thread of Python programming.Modules from the SCA program may be implemented at other institutions with relative ease and promote cybertraining efforts nationwide.