Eric Iversen

For downloading or streaming

Now numbering more than 130 episodes, the STEM Everyday podcast has become a wellspring of thoughtful guidance and fascinating insights into the abundant variety of approaches and activities that go into STEM education all across the country. Chris Woods, a math teacher in northern Michigan, hosts the podcast, drawing on a large network of STEM education contacts and a generous curiosity about all things STEM-related.

Late in the spring, we sat down across a Skype connection with Chris to record an episode that focused on cybersecurity education. It runs about 25 minutes and can be easily downloaded or streamed. The transcript below is an edited version of this conversation, touching on what cybersecurity education entails, how it relates to STEM and other subjects, and how to get started with learning activities.

Getting started in cybersecurity

CHRIS:

First off, what drew you to the idea of cybersecurity?

ERIC:

Well, as you know, we started off in engineering and produced several books introducing engineering as a career and as an educational opportunity for kids, and that was fascinating. Engineering, of course, is a field with many different dimensions, and one of the things we kept encountering as we developed a more detailed grasp of the engineering landscape was all the people working on the cybersecurity piece. And of course, stories in the news caught our attention. So there were several vectors, if you will, that we followed to come up with the idea that, well, cybersecurity is a topic of interest, it has high currency in the news, there are incredible educational and career opportunities.

But what we also recognized – which was key to the formula for us – was an absence of engaging, accessible materials about cybersecurity that could speak to kids who might not otherwise consider it as a field. So we think that’s our forte, translating technical or complicated issues into terms that are interesting and appealing to teachers and students, so we took cybersecurity on as an area of challenge and have had a lot of good success with it.

Nature of the problem

CHRIS:

Good, now I think most teachers have probably heard things in the news about companies getting hacked, and they or their students may have even had their information get hacked themselves. But cybersecurity takes those things one step further and really frames a problem.  Maybe that’s the first part, you know, why is cybersecurity such a big problem?

ERIC:

Well, that is an excellent question. You know, I like where you started with that, which was to talk about the individual or local dimension to cybersecurity. You know, we’re all struggling with passwords and managing them and remembering them and resetting them and wondering what a good password is, what a bad password is, and that is, you know, an entry point into the world of cybersecurity that everybody can identify with. If you think about what the problem is, basically, so much of lives are now lived online and so many of our transactions and so much of our personal data exist in these networks that we really don’t have much control over.

CHRIS:

And that’s even just right now. Think about the future when the kids that are in our 2nd grade or 7th grade or even our 10th-grade classrooms are out in the world.

ERIC:

Absolutely right, kids coming up through school now are truly digital natives. They speak and breathe the language of the Internet, and it shapes their brain function and formation, literally, so, you know, it’s insinuating itself into our lives and our bodies and our brains and our minds and our feelings, and it’s only going to continue. So much of who we are is laid out on the Internet, exposed to bad actors. The genie is out of the bottle, it’s never going back, and that’s not something to play around with.

How to bring it into the classroom

CHRIS:

Everyone agrees that this is a problem, and that means we’ve got all these opportunities. So in classrooms, teachers are already saying, let’s add some coding, let’s add some robotics, let’s add some of those technological pieces, but there’s this huge opportunity if you bring in this other dimension of cybersecurity.

ERIC:

Cybersecurity’s interesting. There’s clearly that technical piece, and the way that cybersecurity currently functions within the K-12 space is primarily at the high school level, and it’s often in career and technical education or computer science. And it usually has to do with programming and networks and administration of systems. That is an important piece of it, and we need people to understand and to be working on.

Ways of thinking

CHRIS:

Yeah, and just looking at one of the pages in your Cybersecurity Student Workbook, you’ve got a bunch of really interesting questions that kids are supposed to think through. I love this one: five pieces of coal, a carrot, and a scarf are lying on the lawn. Nobody put them the on the lawn, but there’s a perfectly logical reason why they should be there. What is it? You know, you have to be able to think creatively, like you said, use logical reasoning and try to think about patterns and think about situations. That’s not being geeky or a nerd or sitting in front a computer screen typing in lines and lines of code. That’s just being able to think critically.

ERIC:

The opportunity in cybersecurity, though, really extends beyond that into different topics and different areas where cybersecurity can be integrated into discussions of history and ethics and governance and philosophy and economics and business. That’s how we frame the issue in the Career Guide. It’s how we frame the issue in our Student Workbook. We want to tease out those connections for people and help them understand all those different dimensions of cybersecurity education and career opportunities. It’s not just for the people who really like to code and the people who like to work hard-core on technical issues. That knowledge is important, but the things that people in the field really stress are these broader, analytical problem-solving, teamwork skills and innovative thinking skills. It’s people who can see patterns and who can identify some kind of strange behavior connected to something else that’s not obviously connected, a sort of associational fluency, if you will. Those are the kinds of attributes that really lead to success in the field.

First steps into cybersecurity education

CHRIS:

So, a number of different things are in the Student Workbook. It focuses on four questions: What is cybersecurity and why should I care? What can I do to stay safer online? How do I know if I like cybersecurity? How do I figure out if a career could be right for me? That’s really a great progression. It introduces kids to the problem, how to work themselves at being safer now and then what the future might hold. That’s something you guys do a really good job of, focusing kids on STEM and careers, thinking about the intersection of their interests with those careers that are out there.

ERIC:

Well, we try to be like the first point of contact for kids in thinking about STEM careers broadly, thinking about engineering, thinking about cybersecurity. And all of these fields are so fascinating because they touch our lives in so many ways, and they’re so important to how we live our lives as individuals and as citizens in our society and economy as a whole. And, you know, they shouldn’t be obscure or hard to understand or thought of as magic.

So one part of the Workbook involves just thinking and ethics and some scenarios that people can work through to understand the ethical environment. And another part is some nuts and bolts about how to build strong passwords, what it means to come up with a password that cannot be easily hacked.

It’s shocking to think about the resources available to bad actors: eight-character passwords with lower-case letters and numbers can be hacked in about four minutes. If you add a special character, it takes about 12 minutes. It is just not that hard. If you’re not building strong passwords, you’re really missing a very easy opportunity to control your safety online. It’s something that’s simple to do, but it’s not that well understood and it’s something that anyone can learn.

Cryptography as an example

CHRIS:

Yeah, this stuff is really neat, it can form the basis of a curriculum in your classroom or in your school. It could also just be an entry point to get kids in your school who are interested in taking the things you’ve been teaching them about coding or programming or computer science just a step further. But one of the things that you do in the Workbook that I like is talk about cryptography and about making different codes and keys – those simple things where you say A is Z and B is Y, and you flip the alphabet and you extrapolate that further to give kids a whole other idea of how things are protected online.

ERIC:

I mean, you can go as far as you want with cryptography. It’s a history lesson that goes back to the ancient Romans, and the way that they tried to communicate with each other. And it has a piece of all sorts of subsequent historical operations, you know, military, political kinds of transactions. There is incredible math involved in cryptography, and I’m sure you’re familiar with those applications. It’s a great entryway into some cool math that gets very quickly beyond what I am able to do. But there are all sorts of different directions you can go with any number of these topics related to cybersecurity. It’s an area where teachers can be creative and kids can get engaged because it has such immediate relevance to what’s in the news and to what they experience outside of school and to what everybody understands to be such a problem.

In the classroom

CHRIS:

And I think we see a lot more teachers saying, I’m going to look for things that are interesting to some of my students, you know, a lot of classrooms doing things like “passion projects” or those “Google-time” projects, getting kids to try something new, something that they’re interested in and excited about. Cybersecurity is definitely one of those kinds of things. Now, currently, you guys are also working on putting together a middle-school curriculum, early stages, right?

ERIC:

We’re at the beginning of putting together a middle-school curriculum with a full-blown teacher’s guide and a set of exercises that move beyond what’s in the Workbook. There’ll be much more guidance and support for educators, and lessons of different magnitudes that people can choose from to fit the available time, whether it’s a week, four weeks, 16 weeks, you know, we want to make it something that people can adapt to the opportunities that they have. Our goal is that it’s not something that takes special training or extensive professional development, it’s something that could be an all-in-one solution. It’s about how to get started in cybersecurity, but that’s a missing piece right now. There’s just almost nothing in the field that allows people to take steps one, two, and three to introduce the topic to students and to get them thinking about it because it’s an opportunity to be interesting to kids who might not otherwise think about it.

CHRIS:

And remember, whether you have kids in your classroom that are really interested in things like this or whether they’re interested in other things, they’re still going to be faced with these issues, as they move forward. And the more that we can look for ways to prepare them, even like you said, as simple as something like how to have a good password, even just remembering those passwords is hard enough for most kids in our classes. Some days we’re just struggling to get kids to remember their passwords to log in. But to get kids to move some of those aspects, that’s just a great opportunity to use, as you said, a current problem that shows up in the news all the time. Even if we’re not comfortable with ourselves, as educators, these are still some things that are really important for our kids, and we should be taking the opportunity to try to find ways to engage with them that.

ERIC:

It’s a need, and there are ways for almost any subject matter teacher to find a connection with cybersecurity. The Workbook gives a lot of avenues of approach for people to think about, for people to make a connection. It’s something that, you know, you hear from policy-makers at the federal level and state level, and certainly people in charge of hiring and looking for the next generation to come into the field. They talk about how the field needs to go broad, it needs to go wide more than it needs to go deep.

A ready partner

CHRIS:

And the kids will appreciate that. Any other last thoughts, Eric, before we go.

ERIC:

The last thing I’ll say, Chris, is that, you know, we are an educational publisher. Another thing that we’ve got into is sort of de facto consulting work, and we have thought through a lot of questions that school districts have had about how to implement and use these books and how to get them into the hands of the students that they want to, with some funding strategies and distribution strategies. So we want to be a full-service partner on these projects.

CHRIS:

Right, because if your school maybe can’t afford these extra books and materials and things like that, they can help you figure out a way for a company or organization or foundation to fund those. For a lot of local businesses or organizations, something like this is great publicity for them to be able to get kids in a local area to able to think through something important, like cybersecurity or engineering or the other types of resources that you guys have.

ERIC:

I’ll just say, for example, that we just completed a really exciting campaign with a group in Delaware called FAME, which is a STEM program oriented towards minorities, and we worked with them to identify funders to distribute 5,000 copies of our Cybersecurity Career Guide to Girl Scouts, every Girl Scout in the state of Delaware.

CHRIS:

Wow!

ERIC:

That’s been a great partnership, and we’re very proud of that. FAME, in Wilmington, Delaware, has been a great partner of ours. So that’s an example of the kind of thing that we are interested in doing, being partners with educational organizations, not just a drive-by vendor.

CHRIS:

That’s awesome, and just thinking how many kids you’re influencing who are really future leaders, when you are able to provide resources for a bunch of Girl Scouts, thinking about what a great organization that is. Well, it’s been great chatting with you, Eric, and thanks again for sharing all your wisdom and insight. You’re truly an exceptional guy with a ton of great information for educators .

ERIC:

Thank you so much, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

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Eric Iversen is VP for Learning and Communications at Start Engineering. He has written and spoken widely on engineering education in the K-12 arena. You can write to him about this topic, especially when he gets stuff wrong, at eiversen@start-engineering.com. 

You can also follow along on Twitter @StartEnginNow.

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