The major goals of the project are to develop:

(1) A set of mixed reality cybersecurity activities with the potential to engage and motivate middle school students.

(2) a set of design principles that guide the future development of concrete and interactive content to advance cybersecurity education and interest in cybersecurity careers among students.

(3) materials that can be used to monitor and assess student learning and interest in cybersecurity.

Key Outcomes of the Project

(1) Provided training in cybersecurity education to three Ph.D. students from the School of Education and one Ph.D. student from the Department of Computer Science.

(2) Engaged five teachers in designing the cybersecurity activity, leveraging their expertise in cybersecurity practices for middle school students.

(3) Developed an interactive Augmented Reality game to teach middle school students about firewalls.

(4) Developed a storyboard for a “Phonster Quest” game to teach middle school students about Phishing.

(5) We hosted a hackathon with 17 computer science undergraduate students, offering them the opportunity to engage with cybersecurity education and education for middle school students and to apply their computer science skills in prototype development. We also included participation from other masters and doctoral students in Computer Science and Education who served as judges in the hackathon.