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This paper presents a study where high school students were taught computing and cybersecurity concepts using a robotics platform. 38 students attended a week-long summer camp, starting with projects such as a simulation-only game and a simple autonomous driving program for the robots to learn and apply computational thinking (CT) and networking skills. They were then assigned a series of challenges that required developing progressively more advanced cybersecurity measures to protect their robots. This culminated in a final challenge that required implementing defensive measures such as encryption, secure key exchange, and sequence numbers to prevent cyber attacks during robot operations. We used an evidencecentered design framework to construct rubrics for grading student work. The pre-and post-test results show that the interventions helped students learn cybersecurity and CT concepts, but they had difficulties with networking concepts. These results correlate with scores from the game and the final challenge. Overall, surveys show that the competition-based robotics learning framework was engaging to students, and it supported their learning. However, our intervention needs to be modified to help students learn networking concepts.

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