The Department congratulates faculty members Ahmed Ibrahim and Balaji Palanisamy on their recent award from the National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation to host the first GenCyber Program in the Pittsburgh region. With that funding, the GenCyber@Pitt program will host 30 multidisciplinary high school teachers in May 2023 who are interested in providing exposure to cybersecurity and deeper exploration of the topic for interested students.
Nationally, the GenCyber program provides cybersecurity experiences for students and teachers at the secondary level with the strategic goal to help address the national shortfall of cybersecurity professionals. The goals of the GenCyber program are to:
- Ignite, sustain, and increase awareness of K12 cybersecurity content and cybersecurity postsecondary and career opportunities for participants through year-round engagement;
- Increase student diversity in cybersecurity college and career readiness pathways at the K-12 level; and
- Facilitate teacher readiness within a teacher learning community to learn, develop, and deliver cybersecurity content for the K-12 classroom in collaboration with other nationwide initiatives.
The program at Pitt will include pre-camp activities, interactive hands-on camp sessions, lesson planning sessions, engagement with teachers who incorporate cybersecurity in their classrooms, and post-camp support. Teachers will leave ready to engage their students in cybersecurity topics such as threat modeling, social engineering, how the Internet works, and much more. Post-camp activities will provide support to develop lessons or events for delivery during the 2023-2024 school year. More information about the program can be found here: https://www.ahmed.ai/gencyber2023 .
Drs. Ibrahim and Palanisamy hope to plant the seeds for a regional Cybersecurity Teacher Learning Community and ensure the continuous readiness of high school teachers to incorporate cybersecurity in their schools.