Aerial Drone: an Effective Tool to Teach Information Technology and Cybersecurity through Project Based Learning to Minority High School Students in the U.S.

Abstract

This paper describes the design, implementation, and results of an NSF funded Summer Academy from 2016 to 2018, which engaged, on an annual basis, 30 to 60 rising 10th and 11th grade high school science students in an innovative, technology-enriched Project Based Learning (PBL) environment. This Academy emphasized how tech gadgets work and the impact that technology can have on improving communities by immersing students in the exploration of one such device that is a growing phenomenon, the "aerial drone." In this Academy, the students learned various operations of the drone through Python programming language, and some cybersecurity issues and solutions. The student teams, under the guidance of diverse mentors, comprehensively fortified their STEM problem-solving skills and critical thinking. Both formative and summative evaluations for this Academy showed that it helped students improve their critical thinking ability and motivated them to pursue careers in STEM-related disciplines, specifically in information technology and cybersecurity areas.

Computer Science beyond Coding: Partnering to Create Teacher Cybersecurity Microcredentials

“…The authors argue that focusing on how to develop meaningful, specialized-content microcredentials for educators will only become more important. Notably, the intervention of a cybersecurity microcredential increased the self-efficacy of precollegiate teachers toward CS, as has been shown in other disciplines [21]. The results illustrate that resources such as sample lesson plans, activities such as flashcards, and mentoring in office hours impacted precollegiate teachers' self-efficacy toward CS, allowed them to create materials for future classroom use (or implementation), and gave them space to voice an opinion on what was or was not functioning to motivate them in engaging with the microcredential.…”

“…Cybersecurity's focus ranges from how individuals interact with traditional computing devices to how to insure advanced and distributed systems support modern-day society [20]. The broader field of security has always been a highly interdisciplinary and integrated field, requiring domain experts from the social sciences as well as the STEM fields to model, predict, investigate, understand, and prevent attacks [21,22]. Depending on the specific cybersecurity problems, it can require knowledge that includes but is not limited to:…”

“…Female teachers or STEM teachers were less likely to use the resources for long periods of time (or were more likely to use it for shorter durations). Importantly, there was a purposeful integration of disciplines and content, and som of the cybersecurity principles overlapped with computer programming and computa tional thinking concepts such as abstraction and modularity [17][18][19][20][21][22]. Therefore, the CS teachers who had prior programming knowledge spent less time than the STEM teacher who had never taken a programming course or had no prior programming knowledge All precollegiate teachers took the introduction to cybersecurity module (Module 0), and this was included in the time spent by each participant.…”

“…In addition, the precollegiat teachers were given the choice of which follow-on module to complete (Figure 4); 29% o the teachers chose the abstraction module, while only 2% of the teachers chose the mini mization module. Importantly, there was a purposeful integration of disciplines and content, and some of the cybersecurity principles overlapped with computer programming and computational thinking concepts such as abstraction and modularity [17][18][19][20][21][22]. Therefore, the CS teachers who had prior programming knowledge spent less time than the STEM teachers who had never taken a programming course or had no prior programming knowledge.…”

Preparing Students for Drone Careers Using Active Learning Instruction

“…As noted earlier, active learning methods put emphasis on student learning and gives them greater motivation in the process of learning [24], [32], [42]. In [43], the authors described a Project-based Learning (PBL) program for UAVbased remote sensing.…”